April '09 - Nick Rabkin, The Arts' Intrinsic and Instrumental Values

The Arts' Intrinsic and Instrumental Values - Two Sides, Same Coin

by Nick Rabkin

About the Author

Nick Rabkin is currently a researcher with the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, leading the first national research project on teaching artists, the Teaching Artist Research Project. He has formerly been a theater producer, public arts manager, program manager for a major philanthropy, and director of an arts policy center. He is co-author/editor of Putting the Arts in the Picture: Reframing Education in the 21st Century, and a contributor to Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts on Learning.

Nick Rabkin is a member of Practice.ie. Read more about him in his member profile.

Introduction

Over the last two decades here in the States, as we’ve struggled to stake a secure claim to a place for the arts in education, we’ve devoted considerable energy to a nasty dispute about the nature of the benefits the arts bring to learning. Devotees of the arts’ “instrumental” benefits have pointed triumphantly to findings that link student achievement and higher test scores to arts learning. But critics argue that the only valid and strategically sound arguments for the arts in education are those for their “intrinsic” value. In some senses this debate recapitulates older conflicts about the value of art – about “art for art’s sake – and newer ones about the division of our rational, logical selves and our physical, emotional, and instinctual selves, the classic Platonic and Cartesian model of human consciousness.

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