Alberto Cairo refers to the masterpiece book by Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking, in a book review:
Our entire educational system continues
to be based on the study of words and numbers. In kindergarten, to be
sure, our youngsters learn by seeing and handling handsome shapes, and
invent their own shapes on paper or in clay by thinking through
perceiving. But with the first grade or elementary school the senses
begin to lose educational status. More and more the arts are considered
as a training in agreeable skills, as entertainment and mental release.
As the ruling disciplines stress more rigorously the study of words and
numbers, their kinship with the arts is increasingly obscured, and the
arts are reduced to a desirable supplement. (…) The arts are
neglected because they are based on perception, and perception is
disdained because it is not assumed to involve thought.
