Applauding the Arts, Part 6
Off Its Pedestal

Harnessing the arts to improve education makes some art advocates nervous, even as this young movement increases the chances that the arts will find a lasting place-and gain solid financial backing-within the basic curriculum.

Eisner, in a thoughtful essay published in the Arts Education Policy Review (September-October 1998), cautions that turning to the arts to improve academic achievement leaves the arts "vulnerable to any other field or education practice that claims it can achieve the same aims faster and better …. We do the arts no service when we try to make their case by touting their contributions to other fields."

In American Canvas, Deasy acknowledges that some critics will "look askance at" expecting art "to solve social problems, stimulate the economy, improve the young, and otherwise serve the common good …. In a perfect world, we might expect the arts to justify their claim on the public purse and the private largesse on the basis of their intrinsic worth." Yet he is undeterred. Within the core curriculum, he argues, math, science, reading, and writing have traditionally been associated with a kind of rigor or muscularity. So are sports. "The arts, therefore, must be positioned as equally tough. Toward this end the research evidence on the developments they produce in the growing brain and body of the child and young person should be continually documented and presented."

Despite the pressure on the national and state levels to define and evaluate arts education-to make it more measurable, more "muscular"-the arts will probably manage to resist narrow typecasting or strictly utilitarian purposes. Teaching the arts in a deliberate, disciplined way won't take the awe out of hearing a symphony or dull the joy in a dance performance. Music, theater, dance, drawing, in all their many forms, are examples of "emotion, wrapped in intelligence," according to Eric Oddleifson, Chairman of the Center for the Arts in the Basic Curriculum. Teasing apart what that definition means takes more than words. It involves seeing what images come to mind-thinking like an artist, actively engaged in learning.

Online resources for this article include: American Canvas (1997), National Endowment for the Arts (arts.endow.gov); Arts and Education: Partners in Achieving Our National Educational Goals (1995), collaborative publication available from Arts Education Partnership (http://aep-arts.org); Educating for the Workplace Through the Arts, Getty Center (http://www.getty.edu/); Eloquent Evidence, 1995 report of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/evid/eloq-evid.html); How the Arts Contribute to Education, 1996 research review commissioned by the Association for the Advancement of Arts Education (http://www.aae.org/artsbro/arts_bro.htm); National Standards for Arts Education: What Students Should Know and Be Able to Do in the Arts (http://www.ed.gov/pubs/ArtsStandards.htm); The Power of the Arts to Transform Education, 1993 recommendations of the Arts Education Partnership Working Group (http://aep-arts.org/).

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