Article that appeared in Fall 2013 issue of Kansas English

Feed the Birds: The Place of Arts Education in a Time of Scarcity

The central question toward the end of Mary Poppins hinges on how Michael Banks spends his treasured tuppence. Will he, as the nanny has suggested, use it to feed the birds with the Bird Lady at St. Paul’s Cathedral, or will he instead invest in “majestic, self-amortizing canals” with his father’s bank. The frivolity of the first course is ridiculed by bank president Mr. Dawes, Sr.: “Feed the birds and what do you get? Fat birds.” As we consider the prudence of spending scarce education funds on the arts, I find myself increasingly troubled by what we might call the Michael Banks Dilemma.

Some thirty years ago, when my wife and I spent a year studying in England, we walked into the west door of that same St Paul’s Cathedral with my parents. Here we stood in the entry to Christopher Wren’s crowning achievement, a building so exquisite that the architect’s tomb within says, “Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you,” and my father, after soaking in the splendor of it all for a solid thirty seconds, uttered these memorable words: “Okay, where are we going next?” A lifetime in business had allowed my father the freedom to travel to Europe whenever he wished but had not equipped him to really appreciate what he had traveled to see.

As a common-sense son of a working-class family, this man had worked hard, paying his own way through college to study business. He eventually owned two very successful banks, allowing him to retire early and enter into a profitable antiques business with my mother. Even then, though, his appreciation for the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany and Josiah Wedgwood lay more in the inventory books and the net profit than in the artistry that lay behind that profit. Clearly his priorities aligned easily with the elder Mr. Dawes.

While I can easily see the shortcoming in his focus, I would be an ingrate not to appreciate the skills and success that allowed me to study in England and enjoy a very well-appointed youth, not to recognize that his solidly practical education allowed me to major in the supposedly impractical field of English. Instead, I experience sadness that my father could not better spend his leisure and his wealth pursuing things that would have provided him with a richer appreciation of life.

Arts education, whether it be learning about art in a literature, art history, or music appreciation class, or learning to produce art, can be easily dismissed by those who make the decisions regarding priorities in public education. Their stock argument is familiar: “Of course we’d love to spend lots of money on the arts, but hard decisions must be made. We just don’t have the funds for the luxuries.” One can almost hear the mocking phrase, “fat birds,” in these conclusions. After years of resisting such reasoning, I have come to recognize the power of their logic. After all, if you don’t have the funds to reach the door of St. Paul’s, it scarcely matters if you know the elements of neoclassical architecture.

Art can be easily dismissed as a luxury. After all, when the household budget is tight, do we run out to buy paintings and musical instruments? Moreover, those making the decisions on what is essential and what is expendable are far more likely to come from the business or legal world than from the arts. When did you last see a professional cellist or sculptor on a school board? Surely there’s a reason for that absence. These successes from the worlds of law or finance or manufacturing can be excused for not seeing the practicality of arts education, even when they confess the enjoyment that they themselves took from their art and music classes.

In 2011, the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities published a report that sought to determine the value of arts education as a national priority. Unsurprisingly, a committee of arts and humanities advocates determined that their particular fields were indispensable. They cited high dropout rates as “evidence that many schools are no longer able to engage and motivate their students” (v), but then laid that failure at the door of “narrowed curricula, lacking the creative and critical thinking skills needed for success in post-secondary education and the workforce” (v-vi). These are the same people who claimed, more than ten years earlier that when “young people are involved with the arts, something changes in their lives” (Fiske iv). This is just the sort of fuzzy, imprecise thinking that cannot provide anything like a cost-benefit justification for arts education.

Since advocates for the arts, despite the insistent logic of budgetary constraints, continue to bewail cuts, offering the arguments from glossy government-funded reports such as that just cited, I would propose to take another approach, a tour through a school where arts education flourishes. Perhaps there we can witness the impracticality of the arts and force the arts apologists to confess their loyalty to practical matters.

After entering the school and skulking past the office, we encounter a large glass trophy case filled with all manner of hardware representing the school’s triumphs on the fields and courts of athletic competition. We remind ourselves that advocates for sport would argue strongly for the benefits of their activities just as arts devotees argue on behalf of arts education. However, since this is not their article, we scurry on down the hall in search of more cultural pursuits.

Before we reach an open door, we can hear a choir singing. Despite their teenage voices–human singing voices tend to mature in the twenties and thirties–this group sounds good. We glance across the faces. Every pair of eyes is trained on the director. Every mouth is shaped in the same way. Every ear seems to be listening to the voices around it, yielding a marvelous blend of four clear parts.

Vocal music is nice, but isn’t it simply a luxury that a cash-strapped school can’t afford, no matter how fun those vocal numbers on Glee can be? What possible real-world application can there be when a group of petulant teens manage to get together, lay aside their own musical preferences, and follow a leader? In a world that celebrates the individual singing star, could there be value in working together as a group? Before we can answer these questions, the bell rings. Singly and in groups, the choir dissolves and members head to their next class. We notice that many of them–far too many to be real-life teens–are smiling and enthusiastic. Could it be that they actually enjoy this work? Could it be that that enjoyment will carry over in math or psychology class next hour? Doubts creep into our minds, but then a mousy girl, her books clutched in her crossed arms, her head down in the universal “leave me alone” posture, walks past us. Obviously not everyone is made joyous in the choir rehearsal.

A bit farther down the hall, we find the band preparing for their daily rehearsal. We peep around the doorframe to see a collection of players holding various instruments. The conductor stands in front of the room behind a music stand. “We need to tune,” he says as he plunks a couple of keys on the piano. When the room goes relatively quiet, he glares at a saxophone player. “We need to tune, Tom.” Apparently, this routine goes on daily. We listen as the band launches into “Popular” from Wicked. Despite a handful of screechy reeds and missed notes, the group does reasonably well. They’ll be better tomorrow and will sound quite passable by their concert, but let’s be reasonable. The original cast album sounds a great deal better and can be easily purchased from iTunes. The band is an unneeded bangle on the arm of the educational system.

We do confess some value in this work. Instrumental music, like its vocal cousin, asks a young person to set aside individuality for a moment. At times, in fact, the band will be playing a back-up role for singers or dancers. At other times, one of the group–but surely not Tom the sax player–will shine with a solo. Instrumentalists who excel usually do so not simply by playing at scheduled rehearsals, but by also spending hours at home honing their chops. They often take private lessons, which they do on their parents’ dime rather than the school’s. And the skills that these players develop can follow them, literally, through the rest of their days in community and church orchestras and bands, long after the athletes commemorated in brass and wood have grown too fat to play football. All of these things are nice, but do they truly belong in school?

As the band moves through their piece we notice their attentiveness to the musical score. Music reading can be a fairly unforgiving practice. The trombone player who miscounts measures and enters early will be noticed far more readily than the student reading Hamlet who believes the prince simply dislikes the curtain in his mother’s chambers. Certainly the job market for music readers is a fairly small one, but it could be that attentive reading in one discipline will find its way into another discipline. On the other hand, we can ask students to attentively read business magazines without having to purchase any school tubas.

As we leave the band room, the group has changed gears, playing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” With those strains ringing down the corridor, we come to an acting class. Surely no area of the arts could be more frivolous than acting. Looking in the window, we see four students, script in hand, reading a scene as the rest of the class looks on. We hate to judge, but there doesn’t seem to be a Meryl Streep or even a Jack Black in the making here. The budget axe for this class should swing very easily. Then we notice that the most demonstrative if not the best of the four actors is that mousy, book-clutching girl from choir. In the role of a jilted lover she has positively come alive. Her eyes blaze at the young man who has done her wrong, and her arms swing so wildly that we imagine she might take someone out. Honestly, we find her a little frightening.

We know that if we allowed this class’s teacher to opine, she’d argue that acting has a way of opening introverts up, allowing them to safely express themselves since it is not them on the stage but “Megan the Scorned Girlfriend.” Beyond that psychological benefit, training in acting carries practical advantages even into the business world. Actors learn to project and control their voices. Anyone who has listened to a poor speaker drone on has probably wished that person had been in acting class. Actors need to memorize large pieces of text. They need to think about what the other people on stage are saying rather than simply waiting to get their next line in. If looking to hire salespeople, the teacher would argue, we could do worse than to consider actors. For just such reasons we dare not ask the teacher to opine.

Next door to the acting class, we find a theatre class preparing for the school’s upcoming play. Several students measure twice and cut once to build part of the set as two others paint over the flats, transforming them from Hello Dolly to A Doll’s House. Above us, students are attending to a balky spotlight, attempting to trace and fix the problem, and behind us two are lit by the glow of a computer screen and the soundboard. Other students have the various props for the play arranged on a table at the front of the auditorium.Standing over this group, the stage manager makes notes in her promptbook to ensure that every prop, every light, every sound effect, and every actor finds itself in the right place at the right time. Has there ever been such an occasion of impracticality as in these examples of design, construction, trouble-shooting, and organization? We find this display terrifying. First, allowing students to handle tools seems obviously dangerous, but encouraging them to take responsibility and provide leadership is a sure step toward anarchy.

Fleeing from the theatre, we search out a place of greater certainty. The nearest classroom, filled with silent students seated at tables, seems promising. Emboldened by the sight, we actually pass through the door and begin to look over the shoulders of the quiet class. In front of each person, we find a large piece of paper, several lengths of charcoal, and a kneaded eraser. We take a step backwards realizing that we have stumbled into an art class. Each student appears to be suffering from arthritis as they each have a hand held in a contorted, painful-looking pose on the table. Then we recognize that they are attempting to draw their hands. One student’s left hand is rendered on the page as something resembling a cartoon lobster. Clearly this is not a future professional artist. In fact, none of the drawings seem to rise above the level of rudimentary skills.

“Hey, check out Bree’s!” the lobster-drawing boy gushes, pointing across the room.

Bree, a round-faced girl, blushes but then holds up the remarkably lifelike portrayals of her hand in several different positions.

Lobster Boy whistles. “Man, I’ll never be able to draw like that!”

Indeed, most of the students in that room will never be able to draw like Bree draws. Most will never be able to work in clay like Lobster Boy does. A few weeks ago another member of this class discovered an ability to do very nice silver work. Some of them, on the other hand, will never discover any aspect of visual art for which they have any aptitude. They will forever draw hands that look like crustaceans. Would the biased art teacher actually suggest that spending school time and money on a host of crab-hand drawings is good stewardship of public funds? Better to invest in things where everyone can excel like math and grammar.

With that realization, the bell rings again, signaling the end of the school day. To avoid trampling, we retreat from the art classroom. In the hall, most students are moving slowly to the left but a good number strive against the current, many of them of carrying band instruments. “Where are you going?” we ask. “School’s out. It’s time to go home!”

A tall, red-haired guy with a trumpet case shakes his head. “No. It’s time for marching band practice. We’re the Marching Wombats and proud of it!”

We shake our heads as if this mirage might dissipate before our eyes. “What? You mean you’d stick around after school for marching band?”

“We have a competition tomorrow. If you want to win, you have to put in the hours.” With that the trumpet player turns and heads to the right. Indeed, we discover, nearly a hundred of these students and a good number of their parents will drive more than fifty miles to march in a parade during the morning and then compete on a field in the afternoon. We begin to calculate the expense of taking buses to such an event before remembering that most of the funding for the band comes via an endless series of parent-fueled fundraisers. This truth coupled with their utility at the football games elicits our grudging toleration for the marching band.

Before we leave the school, we recognize that we have not visited a classroom where students sit on pillows and read freshly spun lines of poetry to one another. For a moment we consider seeking out the domain of the so-called “creative writers” before realizing that this little school-visit fantasy, so far from a wooden five-paragraph essay comes from just such a world. Certainly creative writing must be seen as a luxury. Granted, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s creative writing had more effect in ending slavery than a pile of stale abolitionist prose, both Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson inspired Revolutionary America with their prose in ways that musty academic writing could not, and Rachel Carson effectively saved the birds of prey not with her science but with her powerful pen. Nevertheless, we must ask if schools ought indulge in such frippery when the budget grows tight?

Outside our imagined and actual schools lies the real world, a world filled with practical people doing practical things. Arts education, in a time of endless budgets, might be nice; however, in this real world, tough choices must be made. If the ends of arts education went no further than to produce art, then this tongue-in-cheek school tour might actually have some merit. However, to see the arts as an isolated field employs the same sort of narrow-mindedness that has led generations of algebra students to ask, “When am I ever going to use this?” The Reinvesting report notes a wide range of policy entities, from the traditionally “practical” to the arts community, all urging greater funding of arts education and a more intentional integration of the arts with other core subjects (15). The report cites the importance of arts education in four critical, non-art-specific areas:

• Student achievement, typically as represented by reading and mathematics    performance on high stakes tests, including transfer of skills learning from the arts to learning in other academic areas–for example, the spatial-temporal reasoning skills developed by music instruction;.

• Student motivation and engagement, including improved attendance, persistence, focused attention, heightened educational aspirations, and     intellectual risk taking;

• Development of habits of mind including problem solving, critical and creative thinking, dealing with ambiguity and complexity, integration of multiple skill sets, and working with others; and

• Development of social competencies, including collaboration and team work skills, social tolerance, and self-confidence. (16)

Still, one expects arts advocates to manage a robust defense of spending on their pet disciplines. A liberally educated person, absurdly impractical in the end, can make a case for anything, which suggests that perhaps one practical use for arts education is preparation for law school. One study of LSAT scores by undergraduate majors does not put arts majors at the top of the list but rather in the middle of the pack with a 63.8 percentile figure, well ahead of business administration (42.4) or business management (44.8), accounting (53.8), and education (43.6) (Nieswadomy). The College of Charleston warns prospective law students that “a narrowly-based, unchallenging major with vocational objectives is not the best preparation” for legal studies (Prelaw).

Richard Deasy’s 2002 anthology provides numerous, data-supported examples of how art is not simply a nice luxury but is instead a vital ingredient in cognitive development. On a more anecdotal level, Steve Jobs credited exposure to a calligraphy class for his insistence that Macintosh computers feature multiple fonts and proportional spacing. Clearly that impractical dreamer Jobs experienced a full measure of practical success.

A 2012 Washington Post article discloses the not-so-surprising fact that unemployment among architecture and arts majors stands much higher during a deep recession than the figure for health, education, and other “sensible” majors (Whoriskey). What this and similar studies fail to recognize was said well by John Dewey some eighty years ago: “There is no test that so surely reveals the one-sidedness of a philosophy as its treatment of art and esthetic experience” (274). When a school omits the education of the aesthetic sphere of the student, then it produces not well-rounded humans capable of shaping the coming decades. Such a school fails to admit that nurses, teachers, accountants, administrators, and other “sensible” workers, devoid of the humanizing effects of the arts are little better than drones, well-paid and secure but, like my father, lacking the vision to appreciate the vaults and pillars of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Such a school also fails to recognize that without casting the net rather widely, the Christopher Wrens of this world wind up as bookkeepers or shop-owners.

When, after the 1666 fire of London destroyed the original St. Paul’s, the decision makers of London found themselves beset by plague, fire, and a two recent decades of political turmoil that saw Charles I lose his head. These worthies might have seen Wren’s grandiose plans as an unaffordable luxury. Instead, they invested in a magnificent project that draws thousands of visitors each day. Certainly a London comprised solely of artistic brilliance would be impractical, but a London without these jewels would be as dismal as the one George Orwell presents in 1984. By the same token, few human lives can afford to be completely consumed by art, but a life without art seems only marginally worth living. If this were true in the 17th century, how much more so is it true in the 21st when changes seems the only constant. Somehow a nimble, diverse, creative mind seems more important today than training in a soon-to-be-outmoded technology or business practice.

American education has weighed high-stakes testing and the accompanying narrowing of the curriculum in the scales only to find it wanting. Rather than hacking away the arts in order to free up funds for a larger measure of what hasn’t worked, perhaps the time has come to balance our educational pursuits, blending arts and science, vocation and avocation, creativity and replication. By equipping non-arts teachers with the latitude and training to integrate the creative domain into their teaching, we can encourage the best of both worlds, sound practical achievement and the fostering of artistic energies. At the same time, preserving and updating arts-specific education, schools can not only teach in ways that do not relate directly to test competencies but also encourage an excitement about school and the life past its doors.  Doing so, we can hope to educate students who envision success beyond the assorted lotteries of fame and celebrity, who can identify Donald Trump as a very wealthy bully, and who can not only afford to travel to London but who find that its riches cannot be exhausted in a day’s sight-seeing. We can hope to educate students who, like Christopher Wren, combine mathematical rigor with artistic vision to create a monument for the ages.

The Michael Banks Dilemma, then, is really a false dilemma. While I cannot share Mary Poppins’ enthusiasm for the urban pigeon population, when the birds are our students, they should be, must be fed in all parts of their being. What a shame if, while campaigning to make school lunch offerings more healthy, we neglect the artistic needs of our flock.  If we feed these birds a complete diet, they will prosper. Indeed, they will fly. All for the cost of tuppence.

Works Cited

Fiske, Edward B. Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts on Learning. President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. 1999. artsedge.kennedy-center.org. Web. 3 Apr 2013.

Deasy, Richard, ed. Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic

and Social Development. Washington: Arts Education Partnership, 2002. Web.

Dewey, John. Art as Experience.  London: Allen and Unwin, 1934. Print.

Job, Steve. “Text of 2005 Stanford Commencement Address.” Stanford.edu. Stanford University. 14 June 2005. Web. 29 April 2013.

Nieswiadomy, Michael, “LSAT Scores of Economics Majors: The 2008-2009 Class Update (June 25, 2009).” Social Science Research Network. 25 Jun 2009. Web. 14 Apr 2013.

“Prelaw and Choice of Major.” Prelaw Handbook: A Guide to Law School. Prelawhandbook.com. N.d. Web. 14 Apr 2013.

Reinvesting in Arts Education: Winning America’s Future through Creative Schools. President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. May 2011. www.pcah.gov. Web. 27 Mar 2013.

Whoriskey, Peter. “New Study Shows Architecture, Arts Degrees Yield Highest Unemployment.” Washington Post 3 January 2012. Web. 15 April 2013.