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.