Americans for the Arts

Ron Jones

I used to believe that my role, and that of my teaching colleagues, was to ensure that we gave to our art majors our full measure of knowledge, skills, and understanding. I like to think that we took every opportunity to sharpen their critical eyes and guide them to more enriched sensibilities as they aspired to be artists, art teachers, and art historians.

That was what college was all about, and I thought that if they worked hard and gave it their “all,” then we’d applaud them at commencement and wish them well (while, among ourselves, we knew full well that many, perhaps most would not “make it”).

While I don’t think I ever said it straight out, I do believe that my message to graduates at every commencement was, “We’ve done our part; now it is up to you.” I now am embarrassed to say that implicit in this thinking was the notion that we in higher education need not assume any responsibility for what happens later, after our students leave. After all, we gave 100 percent to all of our students—so we thought—who were with us for those four, five, or six years. What they did after graduation was unquestionably up to them.

The national discourse about the value (or lack of value) of higher education is making it quite clear that there is a greater (or new) expectation that we in higher education now provide a bit more—perhaps a lot more—than a “discover yourself” curriculum that results in nearly half of arts graduates dropping out of the field before the second anniversary of their commencement (see Strategic National Arts Alumni Project that has been tracking the lives and careers of arts graduates in America). This, of course, is not a desirable result; therefore, we must change the way we’re doing things or we will continue to get the same result in years to come.

What has become obvious to me is that artists are entrepreneurs too. Artists have to network, have to market themselves as well as their work, they have to take risks and have to profit from failure not unlike those we recognize as the most successful entrepreneurs. Whether a designer or painter or sculptor or even art historian and art educator, there is a benefit to being additionally prepared with the tools to manage one’s career and apply one’s creativity to ensuring success.

Michael R. Gagliardo

When I was a sophomore in high school, my band director arranged for me to audition for the Alton Municipal Band. I had no idea what a big deal this was. It was my first professional gig. I was going to get paid to play the trumpet. I was nervous, and excited, and more than a little intimidated.

I showed up for my first rehearsal and was seated in the section playing third trumpet. I was disappointed at the seating results, but hey, it was a start.

My stand partner was a man named John Mitchell. He was at least 70. I was 16. He came in and unpacked an old, worn cornet.

I was sitting there with a shiny new Bach trumpet, thinking “who is this guy and what am I doing sitting down here next to him?”

As the season began, we started to talk. He was a nice old guy—and if I remember correctly (and I hope I do, in honor of John’s memory) he had served in the military, and then gone on to marry, raise a family, work hard, and live a good life.

I can’t remember where he learned to play the cornet—if it was in school, or in the military. I just remember that during all that time when he was taking care of his family and building a life for them, he set his cornet aside. He probably put it in a closet where it gathered dust for years—even decades. And then one day, when his kids were grown and he had retired, he took it out again. 

Donald Brinkman

I am a painter and writer who makes a living as a researcher and software developer and I believe the noisy intersection of these domains is the point of genesis for some of my most successful ideas.

As recently as the late 20th century there were notable initiatives to bring art and research together such as the sadly-defunct Xerox PARC PAIR program, the ongoing Art + Code program at Carnegie Mellon University, and Leonardo, MIT’s journal on art and technology.

The link between art and science still exists but I wonder how significant it is in modern day ‘serious science.' It is astounding and distressing that this approach is losing out to a technolinear approach.

The discipline of computer science in particular suffers from an emphasis on mastery of mathematics and logic with little regard to creativity. There are still bastions of creativity in the computer science education world such as Brown University, where seminal 3D and hypertext pioneer Andy van Dam encourages his graduate assistants to orchestrate elaborate skits on a weekly basis. These skits are performed ‘flash mob’ style during his entry-level computer science courses. You can find a sampling of the skits here. I hope that we see more of this in other schools.

Anthony Brandt

There is growing evidence that the brains of newborns are highly networked and only mildly specialized.

L. Robert (“Bob”) Slevc, an associate professor of neuroscience at the University of Maryland, likens the developing brain to a growing corporation. As a start-up, the company is run by a handful of people who do all of the tasks: apply for grants, conduct research, and keep the books.

Gradually, as the company takes off, those tasks become more intensive and dedicated staff are required to carry them out: Soon there is a lab with researchers, an accounting office, a development wing, etc. At that point, the workers are no longer interchangeable: Corporate functioning has become highly modular and specialized.

Brains have no central processing unit, no central nexus where every thought has to pass through; instead, every neuron is its own CPU. This gives us the capacity for massive parallel processing. In a highly modular adult brain, biological “walls” reduce the crosstalk between neural networks, thereby enabling them to function more efficiently.

What’s interesting about this is that the American education system mirrors our neurological development: generally, students have one classroom teacher in elementary school; gain different teachers for each subject in middle and high school; and study in different buildings in college. The geographic layout of the university thus reflects a highly modular view of the adult, “well-educated” mind.

Narric Rome

On April 2, the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released a study glamorously entitled Arts Education in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools 1999-2000 and 2009-10.

The surveys that contributed to this report were conducted through the NCES Fast Response Survey System (FRSS), mailed to about 3,400 elementary and secondary school principals and approximately 5,000 music and visual arts teachers.

National arts education leaders, through policy statements, have been calling for this study to be administered for many years, and helped to direct specific funding from Congress to make it possible.

Ten years is a long time to wait for a federal study to be published and finally it has arrived!

This report presents information on the availability and characteristics of arts education programs of those surveyed, broken down by discipline (music, visual arts, dance, and theatre).

• It indicates that while music and visual art are widely available in some form, six percent of the nation’s public elementary schools offer no specific instruction in music, and 17 percent offer no specific instruction in the visual arts.

• Nine percent of public secondary schools reported that they did not offer music, and 11 percent did not offer the visual arts.

• Only three percent offer any specific dance instruction and only four percent offer any specific theatre instruction in elementary schools. In secondary schools the numbers improve somewhat as 12 percent offer dance and 45 percent offer theatre. Sadly, the study was unable to survey dance and theatre specialists because the data sample didn’t have sufficient contact information in those disciplines.
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