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David Almeida

Last Updated: 8/9/2009

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Gender: Male
Status: Single
Age: 41
Sign: Leo

City: Orlando
State: Florida
Country: US

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Saturday, September 12, 2009

Great Article About Arts In Education

It's time that I come out of the Fibber McGee Closet and admit I am discovering a trait that I have acquired from my parents: I am a pack-rat. I can't stand clutter around the house (just ask Todd-Michael), but if it can be shoved into a drawer that nobody has to look at, I'm there. I know compared to most, I'm still a Felix Unger (i.e. the disorganized drawers at least have themes: party stuff, cords & cables, office supplies, light-related items like candles/matches/lightbulbs/flashlights) but the thing I hate most is the slow accumulation of things I really don't need. So, this week's project was going through and clearing out an overstuffed file drawer full of old programs, letters, and cards. I really don't need programs from the shows I saw in 2003, and it was time to part with the sympathy cards from my mother's death 5 years ago. While the trip down memory lane was fun (there were a lot of opening-night cards from Jenny Weaver in there), I admit I feel lighter and less bogged down. And now I have room to accumulate more crap.

Among the crap, er, I mean memorabilia: the program from Atlantic High School's regional stage premiere of "High School Musical", which I believe was one of the first productions of the stage adaptation of the film. It was done in 2005 or 2006 if I recall. In the program, Atlantic's drama teacher Jonnette Demarsico included this wonderful article from The Los Angeles Times. I have thought of it many times since and was very happy to stumble on it again.

And now I share it with YOU!

PS Does anyone even know what a Fibber McGee closet is? Dang I'm showing my age...

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Three Rs Are Essential, but Don't Forget the A -- the Arts

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-

eisner3jan03,1,1114470.story

COMMENTARY

Three Rs Are Essential, but Don't Forget the A -- the Arts

By Elliot W. Eisner

Elliot W. Eisner, a professor of education and art at Stanford University, is

the author of "The Arts and the Creation of Mind" (Yale University Press, 2002).

January 3, 2005

Recent efforts to assess and reform our schools — such as global education

rankings released in December and the No Child Left Behind law — have focused

attention on four so-called "core" subjects; reading, writing, math and science.

No effort has been made to address more fundamental questions regarding what we

teach and why.

Although we don't think about it this way, a school's curriculum is a

mind-altering device, a means through which children's minds are shaped with

ideas, skills and beliefs about the world. Because what we teach the young is so

important, we need to be particularly careful about what we include and equally

as careful about what we don't.

What we do teach is far more likely to be the offshoot of embedded traditions

and our efforts to boost test scores, as if test scores were a meaningful proxy

for the quality of education our students receive. They are not.

One of the casualties of our preoccupation with test scores is the presence — or

should I say the absence — of the arts in our schools. When they do appear they

are usually treated as ornamental rather than substantive aspects of our

children's school experience. The arts are considered nice but not necessary.

Just what do the arts have to offer to our children? Are they really important?

Put most directly, what do the arts have to teach? Join me on a brief excursion.

First, the arts teach children to exercise that most exquisite of capacities,

the ability to make judgments in the absence of rules. There is so much in

school that emphasizes fealty to rules. The rules that the arts obey are located

in our children's emotional interior; children come to feel a rightness of fit

among the qualities with which they work. There is no rule book to provide

recipes or algorithms to calculate conclusions. They must exercise judgment by

looking inside themselves.

A second lesson the arts teach children is that problems can have more than one

solution. This too is at odds with the use in our schools of multiple choice

tests in which there are no multiple correct answers. The tacit lesson is that

there is, almost always, a single correct answer. It's seldom that way in life.

A third lesson is that aims can be held flexibly; in the arts the goal one

starts with can be changed midway in the process as unexpected opportunities

arrive. Flexibility yields opportunities for surprise. "Art loves chance. He who

errs willingly is the artist," Aristotle said. Creative thinking abhors routine.

Routines may be good for the assembly line, where surprise is the last thing you

want. As our schools become increasingly managed by an industrial ethos that

pre-specifies and then measures outcomes, there is an increased need for the

arts as a counterbalance.

The arts also teach that neither words nor numbers define the limits of our

cognition; we know more than we can tell. There are many experiences and a

multitude of occasions in which we need art forms to say what literal language

cannot say. When we marry and when we bury, we appeal to the arts to express

what numbers and literal language cannot. Reflect on 9/11 and recall the shrines

that were created by those who lost their loved ones — and those who didn't. The

arts can provide forms of communication that convey to others what is ineffable.

Finally, the arts are about joy. They are about the experience of being moved,

of having one's life enriched, of discovering our capacity to feel. If that was

all they did, they would warrant a generous place at our table.

These are but a few of the lessons that art teaches. What is ironic is that the

forms of thinking the arts develop and refine are precisely the forms of

thinking that our ever-changing world, riddled as it is with ambiguities and

uncertainties, requires in order to cope. Can we make some room for the arts?

Perhaps.