August 8, 2006--Art Not For Art's Sake
It used to be enough to say that art for art’s sake is good enough. No longer. At least not when it comes to arts in the public schools.
Now educators have to make the case that if kids listen to Mozart it will increase their scores on standardized reading tests. If they paint and draw it has to lead to measurable improvements in “problem-solving skills.” If schools can’t demonstrate this, music rooms get turned into places where students can be drilled on ways to push up their reading levels, and art studios are transformed into study-skills labs. To keep their art and music teachers, principals have to make the case that they can contribute as much to improvements in test scores as math teachers.
As a result, arts educators are scrambling around contorting themselves into quasi-academic skills teachers. And of course the funders, always courageous, are lining up in support of this reductionist agenda. A case in point is the $1.0 million grant the Guggenheim Museum recently received from the US Department of Education to conduct research on whether or not students’ analytical skills are enhanced by studying art (see NY Times article linked below). The money is to fund the continuation of the evaluation of the Guggenheim’s Learning Through Art Program. To see if studying art has an effect on skills such as brainstorming and “breaking down a problem into parts.” Just the way artists work. Help me!
And if you think that only the DOE under President Bush is craven, I can testify from considerable personal experience that any number of “liberal” private funders are insisting that their art-education grants also pay off in this quantitative way. And if they have the vision to see non-test-score value in the arts, they insist that teaching the arts contribute to students’ “ethnic identity.” In my view, equally reductionist and instrumentalist.
Maybe the Department of Commerce can make a second grant to the Guggenheim to help them open more profit centers such as the one in Bilbao, Spain or to the Metropolitan to fund the expansion of their gift shop.
By the way, in case you are wondering, the evidence is gathering that children who participate in rich art programs in elementary school do much better on standardized tests than those who are “arts challenged.”
Now educators have to make the case that if kids listen to Mozart it will increase their scores on standardized reading tests. If they paint and draw it has to lead to measurable improvements in “problem-solving skills.” If schools can’t demonstrate this, music rooms get turned into places where students can be drilled on ways to push up their reading levels, and art studios are transformed into study-skills labs. To keep their art and music teachers, principals have to make the case that they can contribute as much to improvements in test scores as math teachers.
As a result, arts educators are scrambling around contorting themselves into quasi-academic skills teachers. And of course the funders, always courageous, are lining up in support of this reductionist agenda. A case in point is the $1.0 million grant the Guggenheim Museum recently received from the US Department of Education to conduct research on whether or not students’ analytical skills are enhanced by studying art (see NY Times article linked below). The money is to fund the continuation of the evaluation of the Guggenheim’s Learning Through Art Program. To see if studying art has an effect on skills such as brainstorming and “breaking down a problem into parts.” Just the way artists work. Help me!
And if you think that only the DOE under President Bush is craven, I can testify from considerable personal experience that any number of “liberal” private funders are insisting that their art-education grants also pay off in this quantitative way. And if they have the vision to see non-test-score value in the arts, they insist that teaching the arts contribute to students’ “ethnic identity.” In my view, equally reductionist and instrumentalist.
Maybe the Department of Commerce can make a second grant to the Guggenheim to help them open more profit centers such as the one in Bilbao, Spain or to the Metropolitan to fund the expansion of their gift shop.
By the way, in case you are wondering, the evidence is gathering that children who participate in rich art programs in elementary school do much better on standardized tests than those who are “arts challenged.”
posted by Steven Zwerling at
1:52 PM
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