Arts Outside Education – Butts In the Seats

I love it when themes come together for me. Apropos to yesterday’s entry about the place of arts in the classroom, I saw that the TED site released a talk by Mae Jemison where she discusses how being analytical and creative are not mutually exclusive. In college, her studies left her about equally likely to become a doctor as a dancer. She says her mother essentially made the decision for her. While she ended up going into space, she brought an Alvin Ailey poster along for the ride on the space shuttle.

One of her observations is when she turns the common assumptions that one is either creative or analytic around. She notes that people will often joke about not being able to grasp math and science or lack creative and artistic abilities. She suggests that given the choice of jobs where you either had to be uncreative or illogical, people would seek out jobs that allowed them to do both. Granted, for many jobs these are de facto status of employees and people willingly place themselves in that situation but they still have the freedom to encounter complementary experiences.

I think her point is that people sell themselves short in relation to their analytic and creative abilities in a way that becomes self-reinforcing and gradually colors our self perception.

If arts people are truly invested in promoting arts and creativity as necessary to become a whole person, I believe that cause is best served by also promoting the idea that analytic capabilities are important and contribute toward the whole person goal as well.

Analysis and creativity can’t be divorced from one another. I think I have mentioned before that the lectures that occur in our tech theatre classes sound a lot like my high school physics class. The backstage of a theatre is one big practical physics lab. And without an analytic mind, I would have never figured out why our ticket office reports weren’t quite resolving themselves for a show last month.

Dewey21C guest blogger Jane Remer makes a provocative statement I have always wondered/suspected.

The Arts Just Don’t Fit in Most of Our Schools

The arts community – arts educators, arts organizations, artists who work with schools, other friends of the arts–has tried and failed for years to make the case for the arts in every student’s life and learning environment. Claims abound for the arts as important intellectual and experiential domains as well as exceedingly effective instrumental bridges to other usually non-arts ends. These claims are rarely backed up by solid empirical research and when they are, the evidence is overwhelmingly correlational, not causal. These claims are almost never made by school people, K-20 and beyond, and only occasionally uttered by policy makers, whether top down legislators or bottom up teachers, leaders and district superintendents.

Because the concept is so depressing, one may attempt to discredit her by wondering if she truly has a basis for making this claim. If you read her bio at the bottom of the entry, you see that her background makes it very difficult to dismiss her. She has both practical and theoretical experience attempting to cultivate arts programs in some of the toughest educational environments around. One of her previous entries as guest blogger asked, “What Can We Do to Make the Arts Count As Education?” In that entry, she lays out some of the reasons the arts aren’t gaining traction in those schools which it is present.

Other than suggesting local action, Ms. Remer feels she doesn’t have any real strategies for getting the arts into schools.

Over this past weekend I tried working from the premise the arts would find no place in our schools. What were alternative outlets that could be developed? Schools would appear to be best medium for disseminating instruction and exposure but if that option is out, what is left? There are after school programs and summer camps. Unless the arts community can develop a compelling argument for parents about why their children should be allowed to participate, it is likely the groups currently being served in this way will continue to be the only ones.

We can look to the example of early educators in the United States who patiently approached people to convince them to let their children attend school. That might work but, don’t forget that the real progress in enrollment came when education became compulsory by force of law, and sometimes, at the end of a gun barrel. Tirelessly approaching people is one thing, but I am not sure the arts world is ready to lobby for martial enforcement quite yet.

Technology would appear to be the medium possessing the greatest potential for replacing schools as the method of arts education. I confess though that I suffer from a lack of imagination in this respect. I am currently only imagining progress in terms of the tools that already exist – People learning to paint or play bass from online sources. Perhaps they got the brushes, easels and instrument from a local arts organization seeking to make materials more available.

That’s all well and good except there is also the problem of a disconnect of what happens between the situation today and the one in my imagination to make young people excited and interested in the arts that they claim the free art tools and instruments and go home to practice? In essence, what makes 250,000 Venezuelan kids commit to El Sistema, and how do we get that to happen here? Smarter minds than mine have asked that very question.