Using performances by Leonard Bernstein, Jimi Hendrix, Laurence Olivier, and Whitney Houston, longtime arts advocate Charles Fowler made a powerful case that the arts should be "basic learnings for all students." Speaking before a capacity General Session audience, Fowler, author of Can We Rescue the Arts for America's Children?, made his case through a riveting multimedia presentation that combined slides of artworks with audio and video clips of musical and dramatic performances.
Fowler argued that the "unique attributes" of the arts make them a valuable resource for general education. Whereas schools tend to reward "regimented, convergent thinking," the arts teach students divergent thinking—that there may be many correct answers to a problem, he said. "This is far more often the case in the real world, where there are many ways to do something well." He illustrated this point by playing two very different—yet equally moving—renditions of the "Star-Spangled Banner": one by Whitney Houston, infused with heartfelt patriotism, and one by Jimi Hendrix, a searing electric-guitar solo that incorporated the sound of exploding bombs to protest the Vietnam War.
The arts also develop craftsmanship, Fowler said. Studying and creating art helps students learn the value of presentation and the importance of detail. "The arts require students to care for the details and how they work together," he said. As students work to refine their own art, they learn to be self-critical and self-correcting—and to handle frustration and failure, he added.
Through the arts, students also develop empathy and compassion for others. The insight and understanding that art provides can help students cross the chasm that divides culture from culture, Fowler contended. "There is a near miracle here," he said. After showing a videotape of a Lakota dance expressing the kinship of all living things, he said that few could fail to feel "the reverence for nature expressed here"—or to reject demeaning stereotypes of Native American people as savages. "It isn't intellect that connects us to other people; it's feeling," he asserted.
The arts also give us "perceptions and understandings we could not acquire any other way," Fowler said. Art, whether exhilarating or disturbing, is "inherently enlightening" and "always revelatory." Using a videotape of Laurence Olivier delivering Hamlet's "Alas, poor Yorick" speech, he said that art gives us insight into the foibles of humanity, past and present, so that we can better understand ourselves and others.
Unlike science and mathematics, the arts "provide wisdom, not data," Fowler said. "We need every possible way to reveal and respond to our world. No one way can capture it all." Science can explain a sunrise; the arts explore its emotional meaning, he said—demonstrating his point with a Bierstadt painting of emigrants crossing a plain at dawn and the familiar strains of Richard Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra," which is subtitled "Sunrise."
The arts address "what is most precious to us: our emotional and spiritual well-being," Fowler said. "The human spirit is central to the arts." Showing a videotape of Leonard Bernstein conducting Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at the newly fallen Berlin Wall, he asked, "How better could we express the triumph of the human spirit over adversity?"
"Science and technology do not tend to our spirit. The arts do," Fowler said. The arts "replenish our spirit," nurturing, consoling, and inspiring us. "If we don't touch the humanity of our students," he warned his audience, they could become "modern-day barbarians."
In closing, Fowler lamented the "widespread neglect" of the arts in schools today. "The arts are going the way of Latin in many of our schools," he said. Far more than their "often meager reputation" as pretty bulletin boards or frivolous entertainment, the arts are our humanity, he maintained—the language of our fears, struggles, and hopes.
Where arts programs are strong, schools are strong, Fowler concluded. "The arts are a mark of excellence in American schooling."
