Personal Prologue In 1948, having returned from what Archie Bunker calls the big one, WW2, I obtained my first teaching job. I became an elementary classroom teacher in a cheerful slum in New York City. When I think back to those relatively innocent times, I am appalled to realize how badly I taught everything: reading, writing, and arithmetic, as well as art, despite my shiny new B.A. and my elementary teaching credential. I am even more embarrassed to recognize that the subject I taught worst was art. The approach to art teaching of the day was the righteous conviction that through art activities we could rectify the traumatic pressures of growing up and produce the whole child, replete with an integrated and creative personality. My textbooks in art teacher training courses were Viktor Lowenfeld's and Mental Growth and Victor D'Amico's Creative Teaching in Art. At one point I briefly considered changing my first name to Victor, which seemed an entirely logical thing to do. My education professors were delightfully vague about what art can do for people, and my studio instructors were just as non-directive in hoping to protect and nurture that precious spark of individuality in my art work. This experience left me an incompetent, if happy, painter. I can recall the favorite classroom