Educator: "All the arts for all the children -- hah! "

While we're waiting for the L.A. Unified School District to figure out how to staff and program the new $242-million visual and performing arts high school going up next to the Hollywood Freeway  in downtown L.A., here's a homework assignment: Go read guest blogger Jane Remer's blast of cold, refreshing common sense -- deeply informed by years of work in the trenches -- over at the arts education blog Dewey21C.

Here's a sample:

• Face it: The arts still don't fit in most of our schools and none of the advocacy claims made for them have helped a whit in the last five decades.
• [Why] does the arts community persist in shouting its untested belief in the arts and their influence on test scores, the local/national/global economy, or their power to increase skills and abilities in other domains, both personal and scholastic?
• I am coming to the reluctant conclusion that even after all the time, money and people resources we've spent trying to encourage the embrace of the arts as core education, we are as far from our goals now as we were fifty years ago.

Remer, former associate director of the John D. Rockefeller 3rd Fund's Arts in Education Program, is a longtime advocate. ("My credo is simple: The arts are a moral imperative.... They belong on a par with the 3 R's, science, and social studies in all of our elementary and secondary schools.") She's been posting once a month since February, and so far every word has been worth reading. Find the three guest posts here, here and here.

-- Christopher Knight

Photo: Central Los Angeles High School No. 9. Credit: Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times

Comments

[Donald Frazell]

Exactly. There is as many types of art as music, which will you pick to teach? Music is better discipline, not flakey like artistes, and the common consensus in K-12 is soft Euopean Classical and watered down jazz. in stage band. but what about country, blues, techno, rock, pop, alternative, flamenco, Indian, ranchero etc..

Art has many types, from applied arts, which would best be taught. Illustration, graphic design, digital, color theory. Or for younger kids and vast amount of emotionally disturbed, not to mention hormonal raged, therapy arts of smearings, and contemporary, same thing really. The mentally unstable and weak are everywhere.

What do you pick? What do you pick CK? Therapy and games most likely. See you Friday night, at the Braley Building in Pasadena, look sharp, and bring you dancing shoes. No polyester.

art collegia delenda est