ABSTRACT

Education was to heighten awareness of the world, not just the world of fact but of the imagination. Education had to work through the arts, just as the arts had to work through education. School it might look like; in aspiration it was an educational experiment in which everyone, without being cut off at any of the conventional ages — starting at 5 and finishing at 16, or 21, or 30 — was to remain throughout life a learner, especially in the arts. Poetry was Dorothy Elmhirst’s bible if the theatre her church: both for her more potent means of communication with the world of the spirit than the music which is the more common pass-key. On the stage, as well as in religious services and ritual, men have attempted to lift themselves out of the humdrum world and to see themselves, their neighbours, and the world around them from some new and more spiritual point of view.