This is a repost of a blog that I wrote last December. After a few recent circuitous conversations about arts integration versus arts as a discrete discipline, I thought it a good idea to repost.

As George Harrison once sang: “It seems like years since it was clear.”

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 true comprehensive high school as
affirmed 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 minimally, mostly through field trips. 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
of arts education 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. Some of the organizations were created to be
short-term, meaning to fill the gap or serve as a bridge until the arts
teachers returned. Only, that never quite happened.

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. Though that doesn’t stop people from trying.

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 today, 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.

Education
seems to be very trend oriented. I think that the reliance on metrics
should soften, and that the pendulum will shift to something more
favorable. I also think, or really should say that I would like to think that the wave of “let’s reform the schools so
the function like corporations” will wane, as more and more people see
the good and bad of an unfettered free market and the out of control corporate culture.