Surely the world is guilty of more crimes than this. Nevertheless, the neglect of the human spirit looms large on our record, especially on the record of those of us who live in countries - like this one - that ought to know better. It's a pernicious crime, and that it is so seldom recognized is only proof of its pervasive effectiveness. Sooner or later we all become its victims, yet few people know the extent to which they've been violated, and fewer still dare point a finger at its perpetrators.

Fowler isn't exactly a finger-pointer. He's a writer who specializes in arts education, and he's also - perhaps unfortunately - something of a diplomat. Considering that his book is one of several recently commissioned and published by the American Council for the Arts, this is not altogether surprising. The ACA is a New York-based organization that gives advice, dispenses information and organizes debates but most of all functions as a lobby for the arts in general. Since the arts in general are commercially unviable, they rely - as did Tennessee Williams' Blanche Dubois - on the kindness of strangers, the strangers in this case being the individuals who personally have little use for the arts but who nonetheless control the flow of money that makes the arts possible.

Like so many spokesmen for the arts today, the ACA's Fowler knows better than to bite the hand that feeds him. He gives the impression that he understands the basic issue, but he sidesteps it every time he approaches it. This is, to be sure, a well-researched book, packed as full with quotations from leading philosophers and educators as it is with comparative statistics that show how arts programs in the nation's schools have deteriorated over the last decade. The opinions it expresses, both Fowler's and those of the thinkers he cites, present an excellent argument at least for the need to rectify the situation. And its title - ''Can We Save the Arts for America's Children?'' - asks an important question.

It does not, however, give an answer, not unless one translates its Pollyanna-ish conclusion as a tentative ''maybe.''

In his opening salvo, in a section ominously labled ''A catastrophe in the making,'' Fowler writes of the ''serious decline'' that arts education in the school systems has experienced since the late 1970s, and in the ensuing chapters he gives plenty of data - regarding cutbacks in programs, the watering-down of curricula, reduction in standards of teacher training and so on - to support his observation. This is hard-hitting stuff. And it's useful; for those who periodically do battle with the forces of ignorance, it provides ammunition, and for the ignoramuses themselves - on the off-hand chance they would actually explore a book like this - it is a source of possible enlightenment.

Then, in his conclusion, Fowler takes back all his punches. ''We are on the forefront of turning America's surge of interest in the arts into firm policies to guide the nation's school systems,'' he writes. But for this he gives no solid evidence.

Wishing it were so doesn't make it so, yet apparently this is the method Fowler espouses. Things are so bad now that everyone simply has to realize it, he seems to be saying, and thus things simply have to get better.

I share Fowler's optimism, but only to a point. I believe that eventually there will be a turn-around, and I'm aware that a grass-roots movement for improvements in all areas of public education has already begun. I suspect, though, that it will be a while before the tax-paying voters of this country get on the bandwagon in significant numbers.

E.D. Hirsch's book, ''Cultural Literacy,'' was a best seller last year, but the majority of Americans still don't know that they're culturally illiterate. Nor do they know that their deprivation is by and large a direct result of the rotten deal they got when they went to public school. For that matter, the majority of our leaders don't see the problem. And because they don't see it, they don't know that they are the problem.

Since tact is something I do not share with Fowler, I'll take it upon myself to come right out and state what seems to be the unarticulated theme of his book: The root of our educational crisis is pig-headedness in high places.

By high places I mean the influential chairs occupied by politicians, corporate executives, public school officials and the like. Most of these people went to college, and some of them make a lot of money. Forgive me as I generalize, but most of them - in spite of their success - are uneducated. Their degrees tend to be not in the humanities but in law, business and other ''practical'' areas. Their talent, too, is entirely practical. They can read right through a report and see directly to the bottom line; they can evaluate a proposal and sense instantly how it will sit with their constituency. Like mechanics, they know how to make things work. Rarely, though, do they ponder the long-range effects of their projects, or the relationships those projects have to historical antecedents. Such matters are left to intellectuals, but intellectuals - because they spend too much time thinking - seldom get elected to positions that count.

Forgive me again as I put words into the mouths of our uneducated leaders, but their policy vis-a-vis high-quality arts education - actually, vis-a-vis any genuine education - seems to be this: ''Hey, I got along well enough without it, and look where I am today. Besides, what good is all this cultural stuff anyway? Science and math, well, sure, that's important. But studying music or painting or literature isn't going to help a kid go out and get a job. Oh, it gives them something to do while they're in school, and maybe it gives them a sort of - you know - hobby for when they get older. But who really takes 'culture' seriously? Come on, I've got more important things to worry about. Like unemployment, and crime, and drugs.''

Unemployment, crime, drugs. . . . These are major concerns today. That they are intertwined has long been known by sociologists, and even people in high places are finally beginning to see the correlation. But our leaders need to take it a step further if they are to deal with the cause, not just the symptoms, of our national disease.

For starters, they might contemplate the imagery of the Vachel Lindsay poem that introduces Fowler's book. If they recognize the people Lindsay portrays, they might consider the reasons for their sorry state. Why are so many Americans today ''ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed''? Why do they ''starve so dreamlessly,'' and so ''seldom reap,'' and ''have no gods to serve,'' and ''die like sheep''? Why are their lives so barren that their sole motivation is the thought of the next drug-induced euphoria?

Having pondered that, our leaders might turn their attention to the law-abiding portion of the population. Aside from the material benefits that result from a reasonably good paycheck, what are the driving forces behind most of our workers? Consumerism is rampant, but to what end? How many employees are happy with their jobs, or happy with their lives? It's not just the criminal drug-abusers who are ''ox-like'' and ''leaden-eyed.'' Look around.

In a chapter titled ''The Nod and Nudge of Educational Reform,'' Fowler makes what is perhaps his most salient point:

''By far the most serious and tragic consequences of the blatant minimalization and diminution of the arts in many American schools is the effect that hiatus is having and will continue to have on the lives of the students. This next generation is devoid of the humanizing force of the arts. They are lost to the insights and the pleasures that the arts afford. They have been effectively cut off from a significant part of their cultural heritage. And in the act of that severance, the nation disavows the brilliant achievements of their artist-ancestors, disregarding them like so many worthless shards. Lacking any depth of knowledge about the artistic culture of the past or even of their own time, these students are undereducated and miseducated. The United States will not prosper on the backs of their depleted lives.''

Maybe this is something even our uneducated, albeit highly pragmatic, leaders can understand.

Its seeds were planted as long ago as the early 1960s, but it has taken until lately for its shoots to surface. Doubtless it will be another long while - 15 or 20 years, probably - before its fruits are able to be harvested and enjoyed. In the meantime, at least it's being cultivated. And the number of persons actively involved in the process seems to get larger every day.

What's growing is the popularity of the idea in this country that intimate knowledge of the arts is crucial to the workings of a healthy society.

That's remarkable, because America has traditionally been slow to recognize the value of music, drama, painting, sculpture, dance, poetry, fiction and all the other areas of human endeavor that we lump under the ''arts'' rubric.

Our founding fathers, it's true, were sometimes eloquent on the subject.

George Washington, for example, felt that ''the arts and sciences essential to the prosperity of the state and to the ornament and happiness of human life have a primary claim to the encouragement of every lover of his country and mankind.''

Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison, wrote that the object of his enthusiasm for the arts was ''to improve the taste of my countrymen, to increase their reputation, to reconcile to them the respect of the world and procure them its praise.''

The most famous quote comes f rom John Adams, who in 1780 informed his wife that ''I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture . . . .''

As it turned out, though, lofty statements such as those more often than not amounted to mere lip service. In fact, the arts have long been regarded with skepticism both by the American public and by many of its official representatives.

For most of this country's history, the prevalent attitude has been that the arts - really and truly - were only for ''the elite.'' The concept of ''elite,'' of course, runs counter to the democratic American grain. If one defines an ''elite'' group as a segment of the population somehow superior to the majority, then it follows that ''elitism'' is out of place in a country founded on the idea that all persons are created equal.

It's an understandable, though regrettable, line of thought.

The original Americans, after all, were products of the so-called Age of Reason; they were rationalists, free-thinkers, and very much opposed to ''cream-of-the-crop'' aristocracy which at that time controlled all of the Europe they'd left behind. They established a government for the people and by the people, and that meant that everyone would share and share alike not just in the rewards but also in the effort that made those rewards possible.

Although philosophically they may have been advanced, economically they were starting from scratch. With farms to be tilled and factories to be built, what mattered most was pragmatism and common sense, not highfalutin aesthetic concerns in one way or another redolent of Europe's privileged classes.

That attitude stuck, unfortunately, and by the late 19th century it became complicated by ironies that are perhaps uniquely American.

Precisely because the arts remained associated with the ''high class'' world of European aristocracy, they came to be equated with prestige. Politicians supported them, at least in principle, because having arts institutions in one's community meant that the community - thanks in large part to the politician's leadership - was mature, prosperous and sophisticated. And industrialists happily supported the arts with money, in exchange for nothing more than the instant respectability that resulted from having their names permanently attached to museums and opera houses.

Deep down, however, these same politicians and industrialists typically took the dim view. For them, as for most of the ''regular folk'' who made up the population, a genuine and intense interest in the arts was interpreted as a desire to pull away from the mainstream of the American way of life.

It implied a shirking of responsibility; if the interest were expressed by an American male, it also implied a quality of unmanliness. Although theoretically the arts were good, in the minds of the average American they remained the province of an ''elite'' that qualified for special status only because it felt itself to be intellectually and culturally superior. In other words, the arts were for snobs; even worse, the arts were for sissies.

There is still a lot of philistinism going around. But lately it's been abating. And there is now a wealth of evidence that suggests that our school systems - where attitudes about the arts are easily fostered - may be in for some significant changes for the better.

Two months ago the National Endowment for the Arts released the results of a report on arts education that was two years in the making. Titled ''Toward Civilization,'' the 182-page book was made available to the general public June 27. It costs $9.50, and you can get a copy by writing to the Superintendent of Documents, Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 20402.

''The condition of arts education [in the United States is no worse now than it has been,'' writes NEA chairman Frank Hodsoll in his preface to the report. ''The vast majority of today's adults say they had no real education in the arts when they were in school. Then, as now, resources for arts education were used primarily to produce performances and exhibitions by talented and interested students for the enjoyment of parents and the community. They are not being used to help young people move toward civilization. This is a tragedy, for the individual and the nation.''

''Toward Civilization'' contains a long explanation of why this is a tragedy. In a nutshell, it's because persons not familiar with the arts that make up their culture in effect have no culture. Persons without culture can live only for the moment. They have no idea of where they came from or where they're going, of who they are or why they are.

They have no values except those that pertain to creature comforts, and a society made up largely of such persons is destined to be short-lived.

Letting a kid take a class in drawing or play in the school band is not enough, the report says. We need to increase both the amount and the quality of arts instruction for elementary-school and high-school students; we need better-trained arts teachers, teachers who can help children understand the arts in their historical context and who can train children to develop their artistic taste; we need more government support for arts programs in the schools.

The recommendations are simple. But they're made with startling force. And they're backed up with oodles of statistics of the sort that are guaranteed to catch the attention of public officials whose jobs depend on the popular vote.

If it were an isolated phenomenon, the NEA report might not have much of an impact. But its appearance coincides with reports of a similar nature from arts advocacy groups all across the country.

Just last week, for example, the Missouri Arts Council and the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education jointly announced the publication of a 110-page ''interim report'' from a task force that has been examining the state-wide arts education picture since September; the project was administered by the St. Louis Volunteer Lawyers and Accountants for the Arts, and it was one of 16 such studies funded through the NEA's new Arts in Schools Basic Education program. In Missouri as elsewhere, the bottom-line recommendation is for more and better arts education, simply because ''the arts have intrinsic value'' and ''every student should have the opportunity to explore and experience the arts for those essential qualities.'' And here, too, the supporting data are impressive.

A conflict is on the horizon. According to its survey, the task force discovered that although ''Missouri principals feel that study of the arts is one of the best ways for students to understand human civilization'' and ''prepares students for their adult lives,'' these same Missouri principals ''do not feel that more weight should be given to the arts in the school curriculum.''

Maybe that's how they feel now. But as both the NEA and the MAC/MDESE reports make clear, there is increasing sentiment on the part of adults that arts education - for themselves as well as for their kids - should be substantially increased. Adults vote. So time will tell.

Add to these reports the fact that last year The New York Times' best-seller list for many weeks included two books - E.D. Hirsch's ''Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know'' and Allan Bloom's ''The Closing of the American Mind'' - that dealt specifically with the ''intrinsic value'' of arts education.

Both of these books offer depressing illustrations of the sorry state of affairs this country has gotten itself into because serious, purposeful education in the arts has been for so long dismissed as an unimportant frill.

Why were these books best-sellers? Why have they both been reissued in paperback?

Obviously, it's because the public at large has a vital interest in the subject.

Americans have more leisure time now than they used to have, and I suspect that many of them are getting tired of filling that time with lightweight entertainment that amounts to nothing more than spoonful after spoonful of cultural pap. They're discovering that the arts are for them, not just for snobs and sissies. And they're realizing that their typically American public-school educations - by not exposing them to the arts in historical and critical contexts - in effect short-changed them.