The Big Bang of Arts Education

Once upon a time, most public schools had substantial arts education, with music and art most often recognized as the formal, official art forms. Dance and theater more often appeared as extracurricular activities, i.e., drama club. For many, many years, classroom teachers were expected to be able to teach the art forms. Primary school teachers were required to have a rudimentary knowledge of the piano, and teach dance, art, music, and drama in grades K-6. Many systems did not offer arts specialists licenses in the primary grades until the late 20th century.

The emergence of the true comprehensive high school as envisioned by James Conant starting in 1959, gave great cause for arts education to expand, as a broader curriculum with expanded teaching staffs created a greater supply of secondary level arts education than ever before.

This period was fairly simple in terms of the variety of approaches to instruction, and indeed the architecture of K-12 arts education. School faculty taught the arts; arts organizations enhanced this instruction. Most of the approach was disciplined-based; little was integrated. The teaching artist as formal entity had not yet appeared and arts education was dominated by traditional Western forms. In many ways it parallels the overall arts field itself: the forms were well defined and there were fewer of them. The modes of distribution and dissemination were much, much more limited.

The big bang occurred in the 70’s, when a combination of a difficult economy, back-to-basics movement, and other assorted and sundry pressures and reforms created a gradual decline in arts education, particularly in the large urban school systems.

The big bang led to an expansion in what had been a relatively minor area in the non-profit arts sector: the arts education organization. I guess you can say the arts education organization as we know it was created during this big bang. In addition, we saw an expansion of arts education departments within arts organizations.

In many ways the big bang can be best observed and understood through the wide array of approaches to instruction that occurred in its aftermath: arts integrated across the curriculum; aesthetic education; youth development programs; and more. Add to this the emergence of the teaching artist, and you’ve got quite a different lot today than in 1959. Arts education split into many different pieces, much of which continues to cause great debate among practitioners.

At the same time, the arts as we know it have changed dramatically too. The field is much bigger, the modes of dissemination have changed drastically, the ways in which we categorize the various disciplines has changed dramatically, including new categories as well as the blending of categories. Thanks to technology, people can create art as never before, in their own homes and share it with a world in ways unimaginable 30 years ago. For instance, you can learn to compose, in your home, without a teacher, without coming in contact with musicians–without playing a traditional instrument.

I guess you could also liken the change to Humpty Dumpty. That’s right, all the kings horses and all the kings men couldn’t put arts education together again.

While I don’t question the importance of quality, I do think that some of the discussions about quality track to this big bang. The pursuit of quality through instructional materials, through standards, through training, through compliance, and so much more.

On one hand, it’s remarkable, for many of those driving education policy and even leading school systems don’t give a damn about quality: they care about numbers. Metrics define the quality. And, in some ways you can’t blame them. It’s much harder to pursue quality through the lens of the art of teaching and learning. NCLB attempts to do this, from the perspective of teacher quality, through metrics associated with credentials, i.e., “how many teachers are teaching out of license?” Real teachers and administrators, practitioners, will tell you that approach doesn’t do much for understanding quality. Others want to judge teaching quality by the scores on standardized tests. Still others have taken a much tougher road: at one point the Dayton, Ohio teachers union developed a significant peer review system.

Can you tell quality of an orchestra by how many subs are hired or how many tickets are sold? Does the short-term interest in an artist really tell us about the quality of the work?

In the name of quality, I’ve seen first-hand the attempts to bring back the architectures of the fifties, the structure of certified arts teachers, enhanced by teaching artists and arts organizations, and while progress has been made in many places, it’s still a Humpty-Dumpty situation: it’s a different field, that continues to change just as the arts continue to change. It can never be put back together again, the promise is in the reshaping, the rethinking, and I believe in finding ways to create a virtuous cycle between teaching and learning in arts and education, to practice in the art forms themselves, however you may define them. Another way of putting it would be to ask how certain qualities of art making, artistic sensibilities–ways of thinking and knowing, can positively affect education, and vice versa.