I am one of the lucky people in this world who benefitted from an education that was rich in art, music, creativity and writing. I am also discovering that I am becoming a rarity in our world, due to the short-sighted pencil pushers out there who think sports and math should be saved in our schools and in our country and that arts are just a luxury.
I first noticed this new mind-set a few years ago. It has since made its way into Congress which wants to cut funding to the National Endowment of the Arts, PBS and many other so called “arts organizations.” Now I see that once again we want to cut arts and music programs from the schools because they aren’t helping our children compete in the world.
What a bunch of crap! Children aren’t all machines. We can’t program them to all be math and science whizzes. Some will become artists, musicians, writers, sculptors, photographers and playwrights. We aren’t all cut from the same cloth, even though the so-called “education experts” and legislators want us to think so.
The downfall, of course, began with the standardized testing President Bush engineered. Instead of teaching our children to excel in their own strengths, we want to marshall them all into neat little boxes filled swith engineers, scientists, and mathematicians. Standardized testing has virtually killed a teacher’s ability to see something in a student and nurture it. Instead, they have to teach to the test. Anything outside of the box isn’t encouraged or allowed. And now teachers can be fired for poor test scores or at least have their pay reduced because they aren’t great teachers.
I had great teachers. They taught out of the box and they lit the light in many a child’s soul who was never going to be a math whiz or a chemist. I still think fondly back at Ms. Merekei and Ms. Matthewson, who engineered a wonderful project list that allowed us to explore ourselves through non-traditional methods. I wrote and performed my first play in that class. It was a Sherlock Holmes thriller. It was Mr. Goodale who taught me to sight read music.
Mrs. Hacker got me into journalism and through her often untraditional teaching methods, taught me to love our language. Mr. Mitsui taught me how to write haikus. Mr. Gleason taught me to really love music.
If I was in school today, I probably would be a dropout. I was never good with math and science was a bit of a bore.
But without these teachers and without the arts, I don’t even know what I would be like today. I have taken all the little bits and pieces these teachers gave me and nurtured in me and made a career out of it.
How lucky am I?
In case all these educational experts haven’t noticed, our entire society is based on the arts. Our understanding of the ancient world is only because of our predecessors who took the time to write it down, paint it, sculpt it and think about it. No one remembers the final score of Christians vs. Lions in the Colosseum. But we still can marvel at the Mona Lisa, the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel and the writings of Plato, all because of the arts.
While we continue to gut the arts, we expand our funding of sports. I even saw that one high school in the U.S. just completed at $60 million stadium. Now I know there’s a bunch of you sporty types that say it teaches discipline and teamwork. Have you ever played in a symphonic band, where all the different parts come together to make magic? Have you ever sung soprano in an a capella choir, or ended together on a note that was so crisp and precise that the audience sprung to its feet? Have you ever exposed your very soul in a monologue? Or have you ever put the finishing touches to an original play or a painting that was your masterpiece?
You want to talk about discipline or teamwork? The arts are all about that. The discipline and teamwork required to perform a musical is far more complex than the plays a bunch of football players have to learn. The timing of a choreographed dance is far more demanding than a courtside press in basketball. And don’t even get me started on baseball, which is the most nonsensical sport on the planet outside of curling!
Without the arts, we lose the very soul of civilization. Rather than celebrate it, we shuffle it into the dark shadows of the underground. Sure, the world will keep spinning on its axis. I would love to come up with some flowery prose about the importance of the arts, but I think Richard Dreyfuss, who starred in a great teacher movie, Mr. Holland’s Opus, said it best:
For some strange reason, when it comes to music and the arts, our world view has led us to believe they are easily expendable. Well, I believe that a nation that allows music to be expendable is in danger of becoming expendable itself.
Perhaps we’ve all misunderstood the reason we learn music, and all the arts, in the first place. It is not only so a student can learn the clarinet, or another student can take an acting lesson. It is that for hundreds of years it has been known that teaching the arts, along with history and math and biology, helps to create The Well Rounded Mind that western civilization, and America, have been grounded on. America’s greatest achievements — in science, in business, in popular culture, would simply not be attainable without an education that encourages achievement in all fields. It is from that creativity and imagination that the solutions to our political and social problems will come. We need that Well Rounded Mind, now. Without it, we simply make more difficult the problems we face.
There’s a general feeling growing in this country lately that we simply spend too much money … that we can’t afford to give our children the education we grew up with.
Cutting these programs, then, is like tying our children’s hands behind their backs, and I don’t think anyone really wants to do that … we hope for too much for our kids, and for our country. We are parents, most of us, and we are citizens, all of us. Don’t let this happen, I urge you.”
As a voter, you have the power to make your voice heard. As a parent, you have an obligation to your child to not give into those who want us to all be robots cut from the same cloth. Your child may never be a great scientist or engineer. But he or she may just be the next person who makes us believe that we do live in a world worth living in, through their art.
Out on the Treasure Coast, trying to find my finger paints,
– Robb