Social and Cultural Impact

During the 1980s and 90s the arts were a lightning rod in what we called the "culture wars.” American conservatives stigmatized the arts as a representation of "liberal," "immoral," "permissive," or "irresponsible" culture that threatened the traditions and values of the nation. Enflamed controversies stirred around the appropriation of funds to public agencies that supported the arts, and grants to arts organizations and artists that challenged political, religious, or moral conventions. Conservatives unearthed and aggravated a deep layer of populist resentment of the arts as a marker of status, wealth, and privilege. In effect, argued the right, artists and arts organizations had a license to behave as they did because they had class privileges that most Americans lacked. This devastating combination – moralism and populism -- effectively smashed conventional arguments for the arts as public goods.

In response arts advocates (in both education and in general) began developing new kinds of arguments that characterized the arts as vehicles for achieving non-controversial public goods – for fighting crime and truancy, advancing economic or community development, for example. These “instrumental” arguments were designed to change the subject from morals, patriotism, or elitism of artists and the arts. Theaters draw people to commercial areas at night, and crime drops when there are more people on the street. People go out to eat at restaurants before the show, so theater stimulates economic activity. By the 1990s the arts began to be linked to higher levels of student achievement as well.

These instrumental arguments are still very much in use here. Just a short time ago, the leading national arts advocacy organization placed an advertisement supporting the inclusion of funds to support the arts in the national stimulus/recovery package that was being debated by Congress. Its headline: “The Arts = JOBS!”

(photo above by Randy OHC 'Children Discovering Van Gogh' Creative Commons on Flickr.com)

The Arts in Education

As the culture wars raged, a closely related battle was waged over American pubic education. In 1983, a government report called A Nation at Risk that claimed that US students were falling badly behind those in other countries shook the foundations of public schooling here. It described "a rising tide of mediocrity" in our schools that required prompt attention. The price of failure would be the loss of a workforce that had made the US the dominant economic power. A Nation at Risk made education a matter of national security, and it became the foundational document of the contemporary movement for school reform movement. It recommended longer school days, more homework, higher standards for teachers and students, and a curriculum of "new basics" -- which were actually "old basics" plus the emerging technology associated with computing. (This was 1983, remember.) The report barely mentioned the arts.

The report’s prescription climaxed with passage of legislation called No Child Left Behind early in the Bush presidency. No Child dramatically narrowed curriculum (squeezing and eroding the place of the arts in schools even more) by elevating high stakes standardized testing of just two subjects -- math and reading. And it imposed penalties on schools that failed to improve student test scores. In practice this punitive strategy fell disproportionally on schools serving low-income and minority students – precisely the schools that needed the most help.

That is the context in which advocates must make the case for the arts in US schools. (Is it appreciably different in Ireland, the UK or the EU? Sir Ken Robinson's report to the UK, All Our Futures, seems a sophisticated version of the instrumental case for arts education, arguing that the 21st century will demand higher order thinking skills, including creativity, and that the arts are a pathway to those skills.) So it seems quite natural that folks would start to look into the possibility of advancing the arts in schools through instrumental arguments that link arts learning to higher student academic performance in general, and better test scores in particular.

(Photo above is 'Children's art work refugee camp' by chrisrobinson1945 creative commons)

Teaching Artists

It also seems quite natural that some arts educators would start a focused exploration of how the arts could contribute purposefully to raising student academic performance. New arts education programs in several cities, including my home town, Chicago, began to develop distinctive curricular and pedagogical strategies to contribute to efforts to improve schools in some of the toughest districts. They intentionally "integrated" the arts across the curriculum through sustained partnerships between artists (they are now most frequently called "teaching artists") and classroom teachers. In addition to breaking down the barriers between schools and the community, these programs also broke down the boundaries between subjects by organizing curriculum around meaningful questions. They made learning far more "hands on" and deliberately brought students' own experiences, ideas, and perspectives into the classroom. And they linked art making processes with "parallel processes" in other subjects. (See Renaissance in the Classroom: Arts Integration and Meaningful Learning by Gail Burnaford, Arnold Aprill, and Cynthia Weiss and AIMprint: New Relationships in the Arts and Learning by Cynthia Weiss and Amanda Lichtenstein). Early evaluation studies of these programs in Chicago and Minneapolis showed significant results, including significant correlations to rising test scores.

These efforts were viewed with scepticism, though, by some in arts education research. They argued that the correlations did not constitute proof that the arts caused student performance to rise. And they were deeply disturbed by the possibility that education policy makers would reduce the arts to the status of “handmaidens” to the academic curriculum. For these critics, the reasons to teach the arts were intrinsic: we should teach the arts for art’s sake.(i)

(i)Winner, E., Hetland, L., “Mute those claims: no evidence (yet) for a causal link between arts study and academic achievement”, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 34, No. 3-4, Fall/Winter, 11 – 75, 2000.

(Photo above is 'Young artists and their art' by Robert Couse-Baker creative commons)

For 'Arts' Sake'?

But what, after all is said and done, are the “intrinsic” values of the arts? What is “art’s sake”?

A few years ago a team of researchers from the RAND Corporation, a large US policy and research institution, concluded that intrinsic benefits could be divided into three broad categories – personal (captivation and pleasure), social (expanded capacity for empathy and cognitive growth), and public (development of social bonds and expression of communal meanings)(ii). What’s most interesting about this formulation is that it moves the focus from the work of art itself – the play, painting, or poem – to the artist’s acts of engagement, imagination, empathy, cognition, reflection, and creation, or those acts of engagement, imagination, cognition, reflection, and empathy that lead an audience or a student into the world evoked by a work of art. It dispenses with “art’s” sake and recognizes that the value of the arts lies in their value to people, to students. Eric Booth, a leader in US arts education for the last thirty years, insightfully argues that the intrinsic benefits of the arts are related more to its “verbs” than its “nouns.”

It also implicitly recognizes as false the classical division between thought and feeling, which lies behind the conventional association of the arts with affect and emotion, but not cognition and thought. The subordinate place of the arts in the academic hierarchy is deeply rooted in the Platonic and Cartesian model of the mind – a hierarchy that privileges rational thought and devalues emotion and instinct. That model has, in effect, doomed arts advocates in education. But modern cognitive and neuroscience is now showing that it is utterly wrong. The mind’s rational, logical, and analytic functions are actually fully integrated with and dependent on emotional and instinctual mental operations. Making and engaging art is a superb illustration of the principle discovery of contemporary cognitive and neuroscience: that our cognitive and emotional lives are not separate domains.

(ii)McCarthy, K., Ondaatje, E., Zakaras, L., and Brooks, A., Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts RAND Corporation, 2004.

(Photo above is 'Girls playing classical music' by dcaseyphoto (creative commons)

In conclusion

Looked at from this perspective, the distinction between the arts’ intrinsic and instrumental benefits also begin to evaporate. The arts are ways of engaging, exploring, and finding pleasure in the world, making sense and meaning from it, and thinking, expressing and communicating through a medium. Of course, that is also a perfectly good definition of education itself, isn’t it? It should not come as a surprise that students of the arts make cognitive gains. And it is perfectly reasonable to assume that those gains might express themselves sometimes in the results of standardized tests and many other ways. Intrinsic and instrumental are, like the subjects in the curriculum, ways of categorizing the world that can be helpful. But they can also blind us to the complexity of the world, and they have in this debate about the benefits of the arts in education.

It is not clear yet how far the new Obama administration will go in reframing the principles and strategies for improving our educational system, but there are meaningful indications that there will be more interest in arts education than there has been. Those who advocate arts education here need to move beyond their internal disputes over its value so they can take advantage of new opportunities as they develop. One of the remarkable things the arts teach is that there are multiple perspectives and multiple answers to complex questions. It is not either intrinsic or instrumental, but both.

(Photo above is '47 365 Music, Maestro!' by spud (creative commons)