Want to Make School Great Again? Fund Arts Education.

The dollars don’t lie.

We live in an era that devalues the arts (fine, performing and music) in our schools.

Sure, we recognize the entertainment value of tv, film, music and live events, but — in gutting art education funding as supposedly frivolous —  we have decided that art itself, as something to teach and pass on to the next generation, is worth less than a “real” education and the ever-present state tests and Common Core.

There was a time, not too long ago, when all American children received at least some arts education in grammar and high school. Older people can talk about music and art-history classes, about reading and seeing plays (and I’m not talking about Disney plays) and seeing it as a value. It led to a shared cultural inheritance, a baseline of understanding and larger sense that the arts belong to everyone. The arts were part of everyday life, like shop-class. There was nothing special about them, but there was a sense that they belonged in the curriculum, that they belonged to everyone.

But, starting in the 1980s, when the government (the great beast in Reagan parlance) needed to be cut and starved, educational budgets and spending have been continuously cut, forcing painful choices and a reorganization of national educational priorities. The clear winners have been math and English, with some science thrown in for good measure. The losers have been the arts, humanities and social studies, as they have now been defined out of the core, central part of education. Math and English are valued, funded, tested and measured, while the other subjects have languished.

Read the article at The Daily Beast: https://www.thedailybeast.com/want-to-make-school-great-again-fund-arts-education