Getting closer to the core

Laura suggests we're like a jazz group, each riffing from our own perspective yet some common chords emerging. One, for me and Jane and Sam and others, is the specificity of experience necessary for the arts to work their power. All comes home to individuals, alone or together, "knowing within" themselves as the arts uniquely allow by the "making special" each art exists to provide. All else -- advocacy, curriculum, arts providers, on and on -- are servants of this humanity-making. At bottom, unlike No Child Left Behind, is, for me, Each Child Fulfilled as the goal of education, in our case each child fulfilled aesthetically/artistically. School art programs are now and likely long into the future the mechanism most situated to provide that opportunity, with ongoing, developmental learnings provided by teachers with 4 or 5 years of education precisely in that direction. (Well that's the goal, any way). Yet in school arts education the separate arts have always gone their own way, trying desperately to make their own case. Collaboration among them is only recently beginning to appear: every step toward it can strengthen each and all. And involvement of the art community with the education community has proven, from long and troubled experience, to be another healthy route but only if that involvement is closely collaborated. Otherwise no progress in learnings. The underlying chords of the jazz band, establishing the foundation for diverse riffs, is what we "thinkers" are after. I'd suggest, for Laura and her colleagues, a careful synopsis of the blogs after this wonderful orgy. We need someone to pull it all together, illuminating the possible collaborations we can build on. Then plans for organizational, ongoing efforts to make those collaborative efforts possible. An agenda worthy of the arts in education and of us as professional devotees.