In the recent issue of Education Next, I have a reminiscence of months spent at the National Endowment for the Arts working on arts education policy matters. It lays out a basic point about how arts offerings are to survive in a time of tightened budgets, STEM shortages, and NCLB focus on math, reading, and science.
Many advocates believe that the best way to maintain music, theater, visual arts, and dance in the school day is to align the arts with social benefits. When students take arts courses, they argue, they undergo behavioral changes that improve their prospects and make for a better society. The arts teach tolerance, they say, sensitivity to others and ambitions for the Good. They also reach those youngsters on the edge of disaster, the tough or depressed or victimized or delinquent ones who find high-school classes boring or hostile or restrictive. As NEA chairman Rocco Landesman put it in the Wall Street Journal a while back, “We’re going to try to move forward all the kids who were left behind by ‘No Child Left Behind’—the kids who have talent or a passion or an idiosyncratic perspective. Those kids are important too and they should have a place in society. It’s very often the arts that catches them.”
As I paraphrased it in the essay, “the purpose is salvation. Some students don’t fit the NCLB regime and other subjects don’t inspire them. Talented but offbeat, they sulk through algebra, act up in the cafeteria, and drop out of school. The arts ‘catch’ them and pull them back, turning a sinking ego on the margins into a creative citizen with ‘a place in society.’”
This is, I believe, a mistake. It ties arts learning too much to social benefits and downplays the arts as an academic subject. It doesn’t insist upon the arts as a discipline, but rather sentimentalizes the arts as a salvation. (See the rendition of the hood “Carlos” in the event described in the essay.) It doesn’t make other teachers in math, science, English, and social studies respect the arts as an integral part of liberal education. It makes them regard the arts as a vacation from standards and rigor.
The arts classes I visited and observed while at the agency weren’t like that at all. They were darn rigorous and exacting. I recall sitting in on one band practice in Virginia that involved one exhausting repetition after another, the leader picking and pulling the renditions apart to identify the errors and correct them for what seemed like two intense hours. (As with varsity sports teams, the poor performance of any one musician or dancer or actor stands out immediately.)
If we wish to bolster the arts, let’s emphasize the challenging, difficult course of mastery, the need to practice practice practice, and the crucial element of artistic tradition in the discipline. If social benefits follow, that’s great, but social impact doesn’t work as a curricular argument.
16 Responses to How Not to Save the Arts
kevinoconnell - August 19, 2010 at 6:07 am
This is all correct. Too much so-called arts encouragement results in what we had in the great depression: poor art for poor people. WB Yeats on writing: Better to go down upon your marrow bones And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather; For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all theseI’m not sure what Yeats really knew about scrubbing floors. But one gets the point.
joelstegall - August 19, 2010 at 6:43 am
Bauerlein is absolutely on target! I am a retired choral director and music dean. Years ago I asked, “Are the arts forever relegated to being correlated”? Social benefits may well be a desirable side effect of good arts education. However, what brings students into the “salvation” of the arts is not societal good; it is, rather, that the act of making music (and the other arts) is, in itself, compelling. Students read and do math not because these skills are necessary in a democracy, but because it’s interesting or helps them solve problems they face. Some students commit themselves to great, and often painful, physical effort in athletics not to serve the country, but because they love it.
brian10699 - August 19, 2010 at 7:44 am
Bauerlein’s argument follows an ongoing narrative in arts education. Do we teach the arts for arts sake, or do we teach them for some utilitarian purpose? This argument is tired. We need to do both. Landesman’s comments that the arts are beneficial for those who are not academically inclined is probably true. More importantly though, the arts are beneficial to everyone. We should teach music, dance, visual arts etc. because they are a window into the human condition. We should also teach them because they instill discipline, encourage cognitive activity, and bring people together etc. Arts educators should feel comfortable arguing the many virtues of an education in the arts not limited to aesthetics or utility.
anon1972 - August 19, 2010 at 8:39 am
I’d also add that every investment in the arts provides a lot of jobs. Artists cost a lot less to employ than investment bankers, and arguably contribute more to society (or at least do less damage). Isn’t it better to keep them in work than add them to the unemployment rolls?
513131g - August 19, 2010 at 9:17 am
Well-said, Prof. Bauerlein. I would add that there is great value in studying and engaging in fine and performing arts for students across disciplines. Recognition that rigor and discipline combine with intuition and imagination to produce results that communicate and inspire is an epiphany for many students, who have long equated “learning” with the tedium of preparing for a standardized test. Thank you.
7738373863 - August 19, 2010 at 9:59 am
One who goes back to the trivium and quadrivium will note that the arts had a place in the classical curriculum: music is one of the four subjects in the quadrivium. This is not coincidental. The seven liberal arts in that curriculum–grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy–are all about being able to speak and make sense of the various forms of relationality that a person encounters in the world, relations between words, speakers and audiences, propositions, numbers, shapes, sounds, and celestial bodies. The arts–and I would include the literary arts along with other artforms–are similarly about relationality. The richer a person’s vocabulary of relationality is, the more creative, nuanced, and flexible that individual is as a critical thinker, analyst, and solver of problems. The arts are not value added; they are of fundamental value.
roxbury86 - August 19, 2010 at 10:10 am
I agree with you – the immediate “salvation” of the student should not be the main thrust. An artist friend once quipped that cultures are often judged by their art. As an expression of culture, for the present and for posterity, art in its various forms is important. Unfortunately, even in secondary school, the arts are often relegated to the back burner.
ngrussell - August 19, 2010 at 10:30 am
All you have to so is sit in on an introductory art class with acedemically , bright gifted and successful students and observe for a while, to see something of great interest. Many of these students have, in my experience, been the most frustrated( and frustrating) of students! They have to think in new ways, they are challenged by abstract ideas and concepts, they struggle to master skills that may not come easily…. and the end result? Students who learn to love and appreciate art, who succeed (because they put in the work!), and who will not hesitate to tell you that art was one of the ‘most difficult and rewarding’ classes they have taken! Art is a key piece in the educational experience.
11123184 - August 19, 2010 at 11:37 am
“Learn the Arts–Learn Through the Arts” is the tagline of Arts|Learning, our Massachusetts arts advocacy organization. Yes…we must do both…since “Artistic Literacy” is a vital 21st-Century Life Skill in a world bombarded by advertising, music, video games, and internet sites. Beyond providing access to the rich storehouse of images from our history of Art, Architecture, Theatre, Music, and Dance, Artistic Literacy allows us to not only “read,” but also to “write” the symbols and metaphors in which so many current messages are encoded…messages that run the gamut of human activity from advertising to politics to religion.
schultzjc - August 19, 2010 at 11:42 am
ALL disciplines are currently forced to justify their existence in times of a) tight finances and b) lowered apprecation of the value of higher education (or even K-12 education, as #9 suggests). All of the sciences, most of whose advances came not from application to solving a particular problem but from curiosity-driven, often serendipitous, research, are also under the same gun. We all should stop whining and focus on reestablishing a value system for which many wax nostalgic. Whining doesn’t solve any problem and is awfully common – and tiresome – in CHE.
pmrojcewicz - August 19, 2010 at 1:48 pm
There are a number of ways that the arts are distinct and have a distinct impact upon learning:1) the arts have unique relationships to discrete domains of knowledge/learning. Art is among the most generative kind of work peopple can do, as all areas of explanation are connected; 2)the arts provide a rich area for the exploration of multiple intelligences (Gardner); 3)Because the language of art is metaphoric and non-temporal it is uniquely connected to spiritual and collective issues in ways that don’t violate church and state separation;4)the arts have a reflective component built in to the work so that they are self-reflexive in ways that information/fact ladden domains are not, and so the artist/learner learns about herself as a learner; 5)the arts stimulate the desire to know more – if one has a good experience with a poem, song, etc, one often wants more; 6)perhaps more than any other domain, art involves symbolic thinking about encoded knowledge, providing a valuable tool to enrich all aspects of life; 7)art deals in non-linear, nonsequential, nonbounded knowledge that much learning theory recognizes as the natural way that humans work; 8)the arts emphasize heuristic strategies and have inherent in them the use of the knowledge – as distinct from, say, mathematical knowledge that once mastered is not necessarily engaged; 9) the arts provide structures by which the self can be organized into a provisional system for living that can be tested in life;10) there is in art a repeatability function – the arts invite us to return to them for deeper and deeper engagement.An excellent example of art functioning as a high level training that calls for discipline and skill while providing undeniable social benefits is Venezuela’s El Sistema that balances child development issues of love, delight, security, confidence, self-respect, personal responsibility, and cooperative communal action with classical musical training.
goxewu - August 19, 2010 at 2:08 pm
Re #9:Interesting–willynilly is usually ad hominem, sarcastic, epithetic, and condescending in DISagreement with Prof. Bauerlein’s posts and their supporters in the comments. Here, his/her rhetorical nastiness is aimed at commenters who agree with Prof. Bauerlein’s position on the value of the arts. I’ll bet willynilly and honore (if they’re not the same person) could set a compatibility record on eHarmony.com.
janesdaughter - August 19, 2010 at 3:25 pm
Post #3: in the intrinsic/instrumental debate, I’ve never quite understood how either kind of benefit from the arts does not ultimately qualify as utilitarian. If the arts offer a window to the human condition, or help to instill discipline, are these virtues not also an instrumental end?
lmraposa - August 22, 2010 at 2:26 pm
Absolutely! Thank you, Mark Bauerlein, for this engaging article.
walt828 - September 3, 2010 at 3:12 pm
This is pure nonsense. The arts, especially at the K-12 level, are not about creating little artist-specialists who have the skills to perform. This is a fetishizing of the arts, turning it into a commodity peddled by virtuosi. “Rigor” is a code word for “regimentation,” the squashing of creative thinking into an analytic mode free from the ideas of expression and the sharing of individual perspectives. The writings of Robert Sternberg on the triarchic model of mind — analytic, creative, and practical — point out that academia currently emphasizes only the first type of thinking, analytic. Arts education, especially the pseudo-conservatory model that you promote as having “rigor,” diminishes what the purpose of the arts, which biologist Ellen Dissanayake rightly identifies as “making special.” We don’t need more artist-specialists, we need more people who see the arts as a way of strengthening community, bolstering collaboration, deepening understanding, and broadening experience. And for the record, I am a theatre professor and a recipient of an NEA “Access to Excellence” grant.
eleftheriou - September 11, 2010 at 10:04 pm
Yes! The effort to explain Art’s importance through its USEFULNESS undermines and endangers the arts. It is difficult, and it is beautiful. Would it be uncouth to say that peoples without arts are called barbarians? Perhaps. And that’s why we need an eloquent, not a utilitarian, way of explaining why art matters.