The Art and Education Conundrum
From the Executive Director
By Ben Cameron
How can summer be half gone? By the time the next issue of American Theatre hits the streets, teachers will be immersed in faculty meetings, freshmen will have started reporting for orientation sessions and young children everywhere will be bemoaning the injustice of a system that threatens to take them away from the joyous pursuits of summer. In our theatres as well, energy will be gathering: Theatre education directors will be hammering out study guides, group sales reps contacting school administrators, and dramaturgs planning post-show discussion sessions that facilitate student-artist contact.
Clearly, theatres and schools are engaged in an increasingly symbiotic relationship. Especially as arts education funding dwindles in school systems, theatres of all sizes have assumed more and more of the burden of training young people and exposing them to the arts.
But not every artist is suited by temperament or inclination to work in the education arena. (Can you imagine August Strindberg at a student talk-back—or at any talk-back, for that matter?) When time and resources are so precious, does focus on education divert an organization from its core mission? And is work in the school system actually detrimental to the integrity and perception of a theatre? In a recent issue of TYA Today, Roger Bedard of Arizona State University charged that the school-theatre relationship leads to marginalization of theatres for young audiences and inadvertently subverts programming. Perhaps, Bedard went on, it even co-opts theatre's true mission of introducing possibilities by working in a context that is predominantly about finding and mandating solutions.
Proponents of arts education emphasize the power the arts have on children—the impact of the arts in enhancing academic performance, instilling discipline and promoting social empathy—as well as the impact of arts education on our own long-term audience development. Ask anyone in Rhode Island about the impact of Project Discovery, that visionary program that ensured that every school child in the state attended a performance at Trinity Repertory Company. Had Jean Brodie been an arts-in-education director (which in some ways she was), she would have said, "Give me a child and she is mine for life; let her finish childhood without the arts, and she is lost to me forever."
While both sides agree that attracting young people to the arts is essential, few would argue that the current theatre/school relationship is optimal—and as the world changes, this arrangement is only likely to grow more dysfunctional.
Sir Ken Robinson, author of Out of Our Minds, speaks eloquently about the impending revolution in education. Present educational structures, he notes, prioritize math and science in larger part because the system was conceived to address problems and issues of the industrial age. As we now move into a post-industrial time, however, this system is breaking down—a matter of increasing urgency, since more people will complete formal education in the next 30 years than have completed education to date in all of recorded history. Already, a recent survey of corporate CEOs revealed that finding creative talent for this new workforce is the number one concern of businesses. How must education be reconceived to meet the challenges, the issues, the necessities of the post-industrial age?
The role of the arts in this regard is obvious: Indeed, our role in promoting greater cross-cultural understanding, in helping individuals develop their maximum talents and capabilities, in promoting the full range of human intelligence—not merely academic intelligence—all indicate that arts and culture stand to rise in the hierarchy of educational priorities. Already the rise of home schooling (which often has an intense arts component), of A+ and magnet schools, of voucher programs that encourage heavy enrollment for arts-invested schools—all attest to a still-too-unrecognized hunger for the arts for children.
And clearly there are those inspired by this realm of possibilities. In higher education circles, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger has trumpeted his desire to make Columbia a true center for the arts. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has created a new high-level position to lead the university toward greater arts programming and investment. And incoming Syracuse University President Nancy Cantor is bringing comparable investment to her job, proclaiming the unique role of the arts in teaching playfulness and responsibility—one of my favorite evocations of late, articulating the value of the arts in a way that seems truly joyous, not just good for you in a spinach-y kind of way.
This of course implies yet another new arena of activity for those of us in the arts. It means immersion into the debates on educational reform, new attention to educational standards and philosophy, a willingness to rethink the foundations of our own arts world even as education must do the same for theirs. It means, frankly, even more exhausting activity at a time when we are running on proverbial fumes. But it also means opportunity—opportunity to change the conversation about the arts from frill to necessity, about funding from subsidy to investment, from serving humans to nurturing the humane.
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