“Don't Sit Back – Push Back”

By Paul Molloy

[The article below appeared in Allegro, the publication of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, in April 2011. As readers of ROT will know, I have a long-standing and fierce interest in the support of the arts in U.S. society, both governmental and private. No great society has existed without giving tangible support to its artists and the art they create. It doesn’t have to be money, of course, but that is ultimately the measure by which we gauge the status of any community endeavor. It’s also the necessary foundation of almost any other kind of public support, including art in education (teachers and equipment cost money), accessible venues (even park land requires funds to keep up and maintain), or publicity (newspaper ads and TV commercials, along with posters and mailings to keep audiences informed, have a financial cost as well). When a government, whether local, state, or federal, takes stands in opposition to art, artists, or any component in the complex network in which art functions, the repercussions eventually reach the spectator-consumer—you and me. The results of that opposition, even just neglect, can take years and even decades to reverse. When that happens, we as a society, a culture, suffer and generations can be deprived of the important consequences of accessible art, art education, and the free expression of ideas. Paul Molloy, Political Director of Local 802, speaking for the musicians union, makes important points in “Don’t Sit Back”; I urge you all to give it serious thought. ~Rick]

'Disaster capitalism' and its impact on arts and education

The union busting in Wisconsin brought out thousands of protestors. Many are waking up to how bad things have gotten.

How did we get to a place where vilifying teachers, the arts and working families has become an accepted economic strategy to "restore our country’s financial health"?

It didn’t happen overnight. The attacks on organized labor, the arts and teachers are part of a scheme that’s been decades in the making – a political strategy that sees the government as a facilitator for corporate profit above all else.

It goes like this:

• Manufacture a financial crisis by taking the common wealth (your tax dollars) and redistributing it upward in the form of tax cuts for the very wealthy.
• Then, revenue that ordinarily pays for things like public education, first responders, social safety nets and food, water, air and other environmental protections is now in the bank accounts of people and entities with no incentive to invest in new businesses or jobs. (Why? Because the government is handing them wealth for free.)

In fact, over the past three decades, these policies created a society where the 400 wealthiest people in the country control more capital than the other 150 million-plus U.S. citizens combined.

The road from there to here

How was this possible? After three decades of sheer repetition in the media, the general public bought into the idea that if you give large tax cuts to the wealthy, they will use them to create jobs, prosperity and a healthy economy for all. There’s just one problem: it’s not true.

• Big tax cuts passed in 1921 and 1925 didn’t help the economy. In fact, wages stagnated, and in 1929 the stock market crashed and gave us the Great Depression.
• After the 1981 tax cut was passed, the U.S. experienced a recession that lasted nearly two years.
• Three years after the big tax cuts of 1987, growth slumped, giving us the recession in 1991.
• The years from 2001 and 2008 saw some of the slowest economic growth in decades.
• Despite tax cuts in 2001, 2003 and a tax rebate in 2008, the U.S. economy lost 4.5 million jobs between 2007 and January 2009.

In 2008, the economy sank into the worst recession since the Great Depression. At the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, 25 percent of all American children lived in poverty, official rates of unemployment hovered around 10 percent, but were more like 25 percent for young people and over 30 percent in some minority communities.

When the country is in financial dire straits, it creates opportunities for ideological politicians to use the crisis to go after organizations and segments of the workforce with which they disagree politically in the name of budget balancing.

The attack on public sector unions in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan is one such example. Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, only in office since January 2011, declared a $177 million shortfall in the state budget and that painful cuts were necessary.

When public sector unions willingly stepped up to the plate to do their part, Governor Walker insisted they give up some of their collective bargaining rights.

What the governor did not disclose is that when in office just under two weeks, he and his allies in the legislature gave away $117 million in tax breaks to corporations. Neither the collective bargaining rights Walker sought to eliminate nor the public unions had anything to do with Wisconsin’s budget gap.

What’s lost on ideologues like Governor Walker is that economists will tell you that a good way to get out of debt is to increase jobs and GDP.

This too seems lost on the leadership in the House of Representatives. Promises of job-creating legislation during the 2010 election cycle have been shelved in favor of more ideological initiatives.

Three months into the 112th Congress, they have created zero jobs.

(By contrast, the Congressional Budget Office reports that the 111th Congress, two months in, created or saved 3.3 million jobs).

However, the current House majority did vote to eliminate funding for National Public Radio (and with it, critical infrastructure for disseminating AMBER Alerts, which have successfully recovered 532 abducted children).

Cutting through to the marrow

Maintaining this state of emergency mentality allows ideological politicians to insist on deep cuts in taxpayer- funded programs unrelated to the court system, the banking system, defense or commerce.

What does this mean for public schools?

• The phony arguments for improving public education that gave birth to the "teach to the test" model will only intensify and worsen.
• When funds are cut from education budgets, existing problems are compounded.
• Meal programs for the disadvantaged are cut, classroom sizes increase while the number of qualified teachers needed to address the needs of all students decreases.

To add insult to injury, teachers – particularly the most experienced and longest serving among us – will continue to be blamed by many politicians and talking heads in the media for the effects that poverty, hunger, abuse and lopsided distribution of resources have on student performance.

These attacks are currently being used to strip teacher seniority rights, divert public money to charter schools that foster a two-tiered, second-class citizenship system for special needs and second language children and to undercut living wages for teachers.

In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg wants to transfer $139 million in public funds to charter schools next year and cut $207 million from public schools.

As I said in last month’s Allegro, one might be inclined to think that the emergent model of education in the U.S. is to provide just enough training to supply employers (that benefit exponentially from these tax cuts) with a continuous source of cheap, unskilled and low-skilled labor.

Attacking the arts

The offensive against the arts occurs on multiple fronts. During the culture wars of the 1980’s, certain religious groups and their political allies in congress assailed certain federally funded works of art as indecent, blasphemous or subversive.

Calls for "decency" and "moral values" – litmus tests for works of art that received public funding – buzzed throughout Capitol Hill.

When the NEA came up for a five-year budget review in 1989, North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms introduced an appropriation bill to ban the funding of what he considered "obscene" art.

His bill failed, but the compromise has had a chilling effect on federal funding of free speech and artistic expression ever since.

It required the NEA to adopt obscenity guidelines established in 1973 by the Supreme Court.

While Congress couldn’t directly deny grants to artists whose work it considered obscene, the NEA had to from that point forward.

However, Congress does have the authority to defund the NEA, and depending on which party controls both chambers, threatens to do so in the name of decency, family values and fiscal prudency.

As part of the temporary budget bill passed the first week of March, the House of Representatives voted to cut $43 million in funding for the NEA and kill the Arts in Education programs at the U.S. Department of Education.

(Incidentally, the greatest beneficiaries of this program are New York State schoolchildren.)

In addition, the House also voted to cut significant funding for the National Writing Project ($25.6 million), Reading is Fundamental ($24.8 million), Teach for America ($18 million), National Board for Professional Teaching Standards ($10.7 million), New Leaders for New Schools ($5 million) and many other important arts education programs.

In addition to attacking arts and arts funding from a cultural point of view, anti-intellectualism, a centuries old, divisive propaganda tool which shuns individual expression and independent thought, is deployed to generate hostility and mistrust toward artists and teachers for political gain.

The argument goes like this. Education and expertise are regarded as the arrogant and snobbish products of an elite and privileged upbringing and are therefore out of sync with mainstream American values and the "just folks, wanna-have-a-beer-with" personas we seek to hold office and make major decisions.

As a result, those with backgrounds in the arts, sciences, philosophy or literature are to be regarded with suspicion and contempt (as are their supporters in office and other places of influence).

By delegitimizing these fields, their respective workforces and the skills necessary to work in them, it becomes "acceptable" to cut funding for higher education, despite what people like our president and governor say about helping our kids become more competitive in the workplace through a leaner, more efficient education system.

Since 2008, 43 states have enacted drastic cuts in higher education, making it more difficult for kids from poor and middle class families to get the quality education they need to succeed in life.

In New York, Gov. Cuomo wants to cut aid to State colleges by 10 percent. In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Corbett wants to cut funding for state colleges and universities by nearly 50 percent.

Don't sit back: push back

Canadian journalist and author Naomi Klein coined the phrase "disaster capitalism" to describe "this phenomenon of seizing disasters to push through this radical brand of capitalism . . ." She maintains that such public policies "only work if we don’t know about them."

The general public is slowly beginning to wake up to the extreme ideological overreach witnessed in recent weeks.

Protesters took to the state capitals in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and Michigan to protest their respective governors’ threats to public sector unions and working families.

Demonstrations continue nationwide in favor of collective bargaining rights and balanced tax policies that benefit all Americans, not just 400 of them.

In a show of solidarity, Local 802 members took to the streets and joined with other unions in demonstrations at New York City Hall and the Statehouse in Trenton, New Jersey.

As for our industry, I’ve said it again and again. Unless we are willing to settle for a dystopian society devoid of curiosity beyond which mall has better curly fries, we cannot sit idly by and allow these deep, harmful cuts in arts and education.

As long we ignore cynical, reverse-Robin Hood public policies that steal from the poor to give to the rich, we can expect more cuts in arts and education spending, more attacks on organized labor and even larger transfers of wealth from the vast majority of the public to a select and powerful few.

If you’re ready to fight, we need you. Please contact my office at Pmolloy@Local802afm.org or (212) 245-4802, ext. 176.

"The Arts Are Under Attack (Again!)"

By Paul Molloy

[I’ve written before on ROT about arts support and funding. It’s clearly a topic about which I have strong feelings and opinions. Currently in Congress, the arts are being assailed once more, the excuse for abandoning them once again is budgetary concerns. Drastic cuts have been proposed for the NEA and CPB, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the body that oversees public financing for PBS and NPR. Government arts funding is a minuscule part of the federal budget, as it is among the states as well. The U.S. spends far less on the arts, in fact, than any other developed nation—and less even than some developing ones—so I believe that the attacks are only disguised as a financial issue; in reality, they are an assault on the First Amendment, about which I’ve also written on ROT, and a concerted effort to suppress even the mildest forms of criticism and dissent among artists and intellectuals. As most of us know, federal and state money is the seed corn for arts support among private and corporate contributors: when the governments stop supporting the arts, so do many other former supporters. As the withdrawal of support increases in effect where art is produced—the studios and theaters around the country—it also has repercussions in the places where we see art and where our children learn about it. Among those who are concerned about this new battle in the Culture Wars is Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians. (Those are the musicians who, among other work, play in the pit at musicals.) Below is an article that appeared in the March 2011 edition of Allegro, the newsletter of Local 802; I’m republishing it because I think the author, Paul Molloy, has stated the case eloquently.]

Here we go again. With familiar clichés about "making tough choices in these tough economic times," the arts are under attack.

Perhaps I should say the arts remain under attack. The slashing and burning of arts budgets nationwide hasn’t really stopped. Nor has the rhetoric of freedom-loving politicians determined to stifle freedom of expression abated much either.

Nationally, the culture wars of the 90’s are darkening our doorways again. In New York, the state arts council budget saw its grantmaking funds slashed twice in 2008. Then it sustained a $3.5 million cut in 2009 and a $6 million cut in 2010. Now it faces a $10 million cut this year.

Despite the jobs that the arts create and sustain, the income they generate, and the tax revenue they send to local and state coffers, too many elected officials cling to the myth that funding the arts is unnecessary. These politicians seem to believe that little or no funding for the nonprofit creative sector will have no negative economic impact.

Institutional ignorance of the arts isn’t limited to the nonprofit sector. Many politicians are unaware of or simply dismiss the link between receiving a strong, comprehensive arts education and the benefits it yields.

For example, a Wallace Foundation study revealed that school children who participate in arts demonstrated the following:

• Improved academic performance
• Improved attitudes and skills that promote the learning process
• Improved general life skills, such as critical thinking and self-discipline
• Improved understanding that one’s behavior has consequences
• Improved pro-social attitudes and behaviors among at-risk youth

If far-sighted leaders who understand this can’t reverse this dangerous, scorched-Earth policy toward arts funding and arts education, our nation faces a dismal and uncertain future. It’s like a NASCAR driver stuck with a pit crew hostile to transmission fluid, even though it makes the car go forward. Without it, the driver is doomed to go nowhere. And that is precisely where many of our leaders are taking the country when it comes to arts funding and arts education.

Conversations on arts education by our elected leaders at all levels of government appear nonexistent. However, discussions about education in the U.S. revolve around a single concept: competition. In fact, this word, along with its variations, appeared 11 times in Obama’s state of the union address, seven times in Cuomo’s state of the state address and six times in Bloomberg’s state of the city address.

Incidentally, those speeches had another thing in common – the number of references to the advantages of a well-rounded arts education: zero. Ironically, in 2008, candidate Obama released the following statement on his arts policy:

"As president, Barack Obama will use the bully pulpit and the example he will set in the White House to promote the importance of arts and arts education in America. Not only is arts education indispensable for success in a rapidly changing, high skill, information economy, but studies show that arts education raises test scores in other subject areas as well."

Those leaders overlook long established truths on the advantages of a fully implemented arts curriculum in our public schools. Consequently, their respective statements on education ring hollow, sounding like a string of recycled bromides that over-emphasize school competitiveness as a means to acquire 21st century technical jobs. What about the creative sector? In addition to the extraordinary cultural, developmental and educational benefits of the arts in all people’s lives, one topic absent from national discourse is that the arts also mean jobs – real careers that enable us to own our homes, send our children to college, sustain local economies and plan our futures.

The current assault on the arts and arts education is broad and deep. The president wants to cut the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts by $21 million. The Republican Study Committee, comprised of 165 members of Congress, wants to eliminate it completely. It also wants to gut key arts education programs at the U.S. Department of Education and all funding for NPR and PBS.

Governor Cuomo, while pitting public sector unions against private sector unions, seeks to cut $10 million from the NYSCA budget. Mayor Bloomberg is threatening to eliminate 6,000 teaching jobs and reduce library hours. His current school chancellor has no background in education. College tuitions are on the rise nationwide, up as much as 30 percent in California.

Adding insult to injury, many governors (New York’s included) and other politicians continue their collaborative offensive on experience, institutional memory and problem solving by threatening the livelihoods of our nation’s longest serving educators. Given this scenario, one might think that the emergent model of education in the U.S. is to provide just enough training to supply employers with a continuous source of cheap, unskilled and low-skilled labor.

This far, no further

We cannot sit on the sidelines and watch work in the nonprofit arts sector dry up. Nor can we expect other people to advocate for us. We must not sit idly by while those beholden to the for-profit standardized testing industry cheapen the quality of public education and turn our kids into arts-challenged, rote memorizers and test takers.

We know that schools with strong arts programs produce smart, well-rounded students. The Center for Arts Education released a study last year that revealed that New York City "schools in the top third in graduation rates offered their students the most access to arts education and the most resources that support arts education." Moreover, school districts with collective bargaining agreements yield strong schools with smart students. To wit: there are five states that outlaw collective bargaining for educators. Here are their state rankings on ACT/SAT scores:

• South Carolina – 50th
• North Carolina – 49th
• Georgia – 48th
• Texas – 47th
• Virginia – 44th

As it happens, Wisconsin, whose teachers are protected by collective bargaining agreements, is ranked second in the country. (Thank you, Randy Landau.)

A great writer once said: "There is a connection to progress in society and progress in the arts. The Age of Pericles was also the Age of Phidias. The Age of Lorenzo De’ Medici was also the Age of Leonardo DaVinci. The Age of Elizabeth was also the Age of Shakespeare."

Artists and arts educators should take inspiration from the nonviolent protesters overseas and also at home – in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and elsewhere. It’s up to us: if we do nothing, we’ll get nothing.

Antagonism toward the arts means job losses. Illiteracy on arts education means long term decreases in our ranks and steady reductions in our audiences. Perhaps more forebodingly however, is what this says about the role the arts will play in American life.

In 1931, Aldus Huxley wrote of a future when people didn’t want to read books, were distracted by cheap, mass produced goods and were more interested in gossip than the truth. We need a massive, collective effort to push back against this philistine crusade for ignorance. Most importantly, we must ask ourselves if the Brave New World we seek includes equal access to the arts and a robust, well-rounded education – or if it succumbs to the one Huxley warned us about.

[Paul Molloy is the Political and Publications Director of Local 802; his e-mail address is Pmolloy@Local802afm.org. For those unfamiliar with the acronym, NYSCA, to which Molloy refers, is the New York State Council on the Arts, the agency responsible for state grants to non-profit arts efforts and organizations. Cuomo is, of course, our newly-elected governor, Andrew Cuomo, and Bloomberg, I suspect most of you know by now, is Michael Bloomberg, New York City’s mayor. Randy Landau is a Local 802 member, a bass guitarist; I don’t know why Molloy thanked him in the article.

[ROT readers who’ve been following the news pertinent to this issue will know that NPR has had some unpleasant trouble related to the federal budget cuts. James O’Keefe, a well-know conservative activist, produced a video recording of NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller making several distasteful statements about Tea Party members and the conservative movement in general. Schiller resigned, as did NPR president Vivian Schiller (who’s not related to Ron Schiller). Despite the timing of the sting and the use of the confrontation by opponents to government support for public broadcasting, the incident is irrelevant to the points Paul Molloy makes in his article and my own unshakable support of government funding of the arts.]

Degrading the Arts

On Friday, 7 August, Rocco Landesman was confirmed as the new chairman of the NEA, following Dana Gioia (2003-09), a poet. Landesman is a successful and experienced Broadway producer and theater owner (he ran Jujamcyn Theaters, the third largest theater landlord in New York, after the Shuberts and the Nederlander Organization); that makes him a practical man of theater and the arts. At the same time, President Barack Obama, who appointed Landesman, has requested an increase in NEA funding and The House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee of the new Congress has approved $170 million, a raise of $15 million over the last NEA budget. On the surface, it looks like the arts have been returned to a place of prominence and respect in our society after years of animosity and disdain under Presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II. Some arts professionals feel the corner has been turned: “I hope that time is over, the period when artist have been held as suspicious by the politicians,” says Michael Conforti, the president of the Association of Art Museum Directors. But all is not as well as these indicators suggest. First, the Culture Wars perpetrated by the hard right may be in abeyance, but there is still fight in that old dog. Second, the current economic crisis is taking a toll among arts programs and artists, as it is among other parts of our society. Between the two forces, as former NEA chairman Gioia observed, we have “dismantled the arts-education programs that used to be part of every public school.” The delicate balance in which the arts exist in the United States makes them more vulnerable than other aspects of society--unless those of us who care about the arts keep a watchful eye and stand strong.

On 3 and 4 February 1993, the New York Times ran a pair of articles reporting the decline of arts education in American schools. Now 16 years later, we are once again in a similar stage with respect to drama, dance, music, and art in the schools due to the economic downturn that began last year. In “As Schools Trim Budgets, The Arts Lose Their Place” and “Creativity vs. Academic Study: How Should Schools Teach Arts?” Susan Chira described the loss a decade-and-a-half ago and pointed out what some educators feel will be the consequences. Most stressed how the arts help encourage the students’ creativity and imagination and develop their critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. And now, in “Arts Programs in Academia Are Forced to Nip Here, Adjust There,” also in the Times (10 August 2009), Patricia Cohen described the straights in which college and university arts programs find themselves, presaging the same consequences for an even wider spectrum of Americans. Students at all academic levels, from elementary to grad schools, will find their programs, teachers, and classes disappearing as budgets shrink and endowments and subsidies dry up. Cohen’s litany of departments and programs in jeopardy is already disheartening, and the process has only just started.

Chairman Landesman sees the arts as an engine for economic recovery and development: “When you bring artists into a town, it changes the character, attracts economic development, makes it more attractive to live in and renews the economics of that town.” He plans to campaign for increased arts funding on that basis. There is, however, another consequence to good arts education that’s hardly mentioned, one that is particularly important to contemplate when the arts are under attack from many quarters in our society. In a 3 February companion article to the two 1993 reports, “Arts Groups Step In to Fill the Gaps,” Glenn Collins pointed out that “early consistent exposure to the arts builds future audiences.” It also builds a citizenry that values our artistic and cultural heritage instead of being hostile to it. A citizen who has taken an art, theater, dance, or music course and who is thereafter encouraged to experience and enjoy this part of life is less likely to enlist in the forces that oppose free artistic expression.

We are fortunate now that the new administration not only isn’t antipathetic to art and culture but genuinely appreciates that part of our society and promotes it by example. When forces antithetical to the very principle on which our culture rests--the freedom to express ourselves openly--mobilize, institutions of learning must take strong, public stands to preserve the support of this vital element in society. There must be a philosophical commitment to spread the knowledge of America’s artistic life to all who call themselves educated; to reinforce the notion that the arts are for everyone, not just a peculiar elite; to assure that the arts are accessible for everyone’s enjoyment and enlightenment; to argue that our culture is as important a part of the democratic way of life as are the press and the law; and, finally, to teach everyone that we must support and encourage artistic diversity as avidly as we do the intellectual and political. The only way to counter those who would homogenize, standardize, and emasculate our country’s arts is to educate every citizen to respect, honor, and cherish this part of our society. We must constantly insist that this role of the artist be recognized for the importance it holds for society at large.

We in arts education must continue to remind ourselves, our colleagues, and our students of the real value of the arts to the vitality and honesty of society. Artists, as Hamlet notes, “hold the mirror up to nature” even when the reflection shows us as King Lear saw us: a “poor, bare forked animal.” Artists are the whistle-blowers of society. There are laws to protect whistle-blowers in industry and government; must we not also protect, indeed, encourage the cultural whistle-blowers?

Arts education reinforces the notion that artists see the future long before any scientist or engineer can invent it. Da Vinci saw flying machines half a millennium before the bothers Wright made history at Kitty Hawk; Cyrano de Bergerac envisioned men on the moon three centuries before any Apollo spacecraft was launched; Jules Verne put Captain Nemo in a submarine decades before a real one was built. For good or ill, as another Shakespearean character, Duke Theseus, noted:

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

“Things unknown” are often also “things uncomprehended.” “Things uncomprehended” are often “things unwelcome.” It is the artist who is usually at the forefront of efforts to acquaint us with and explain these “things,” often whether we want to hear about them or not.

In “The Indispensable Opposition,” Walter Lippmann asserts:

It is all very well to say with Voltaire, “I wholly disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it,” but as a matter of fact most men will not defend to the death the rights of other men: if they disapprove sufficiently what other men say, they will somehow suppress those men if they can.

All around us, we see this suppression--these days often called “political correctness”--by both the right and the left. In a recent administration, according to a book by former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, John E. Frohnmayer, the first President Bush tried “to cripple the N.E.A.”; later, even President Clinton wanted to reinstitute the decency clause for N.E.A. awardees. Now it is budgetary concerns and the economy that are looming over our cultural diversity, even as the current administration seems to encourage multiple voices and creative impulses. (Elsewhere, forces of repression, usually in the form of religious zealots, suppress or attempt to suppress voices of which they disapprove.) Lippmann makes the point that we need to hear the opposing, unsettling voices on the basis that “because freedom of discussion improves our opinions, the liberties of other men are our own vital necessity.” He likens the situation to a visit to a doctor whom we pay “to ask us the most embarrassing questions and to prescribe the most disagreeable diet.” While we are free to seek additional opinions, we must listen to them all to determine the truth. As Lippmann observes, “any . . . sensible human being . . . learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters.” We arts educators must constantly remind the world that the artist is the loyal opposition, duty-bound to speak for--and to--the people.

The importance of this function is easy to demonstrate. We have only to look at the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe where writers like Vaclav Havel, later president of a free Czech Republic, and Janusz Glowacki of Poland constantly reminded the rest of the world what life was like there and evoked images of what it ought to be. Challengers in the Communist world were not alone, either, as witness Athol Fugard’s and Mbongeni Ngema’s pointed opposition to apartheid in South Africa. Today we hear of outspoken voices among Muslims, Hindus, and other cultural groups which suffer under authoritarianism and suppression in many parts of the world. Apart from the few political dissenters, whose voices were often silenced, only artists kept the world apprised of the conditions.

I was reminded of this all-important service artists provide when I attended a performance of Eimuntas Nekrosius’s The Square by the State Theater of Lithuania, presented in 1991 as part of The New York International Festival of the Arts. Briefly, the play tells of a prisoner for whom “everything is against the rules.” When he is finally released, he has been so conditioned to do only what he is told that he fails to start breathing again after an X-ray because the doctor did not instruct him to. He dies, literally, because he does not know how to be free. Freedom, Nekrosius is saying, cannot merely be legislated or declared, it must also be learned and prepared for; it also has its dangers. The reality of this lesson, dramatically and clearly demonstrated onstage, is becoming evident all over the region, particularly at this moment in the emerging democracy of Russia. Doubtless this is a message many people would rather not hear. Democracy and freedom are supposed to be the answer to all problems: once free, everyone’s life is supposed to be wonderful. It takes an artist, however, to point out the truth, unpalatable though it be, and to do so in an accessible way that may not be possible for the journalist or political essayist.

A society that ignores its people’s voice, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher asserted in a 1991 interview with David Frost, cannot “work because it denie[s] the human spirit.” Jack O’Brien, then-artistic director of San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, in the March 1991 American Theatre, bemoaned the dissolution of “the link between civilization and the arts.” He reported: “With suspicion that the arts are too expensive or esoteric for them to understand or enjoy, many people have removed all consideration of art and culture from the ‘here and now.’“ These folks, O’Brien observed, have abandoned support for the arts to “the decadent rich, the only ones, in their estimation, able to enjoy them anyway.” It is this link we must reforge through arts education. It is a fight we dare not lose.

Unless all Americans are educated to esteem art and artists as indispensable contributors to the future--everyone’s future--campaigns to silence them, censor them, and abandon our support for them will succeed. Unless we all recognize the arts as a necessity, not a luxury, when we are confronted with the choice between more art and more guns, we will always choose the guns. The training camps for this battle are our schools. It is not enough simply to offer arts courses to those of us who have a personal and abiding interest in our cultural heritage and have elected to make our lives in the arts. We must redouble our efforts to include and maintain the arts as a strategic part of the curricula of all liberal-arts and general-education programs, to assure that those who make careers in the sciences, humanities, and business also appreciate the importance, as well as the pleasures, of culture and art.

In the face of academic budget cuts; federal, state, and local arts council drawbacks; and political efforts--from both sides of the spectrum--to suppress dissenting voices, those of us in arts education must fight publicly to maintain and increase programs in elementary and high schools, colleges and universities that introduce all students to our cultural heritage. If we lose this struggle, we shall surely see the prescience of William Blake’s 1808 admonition: “Degrade first the arts if you’d mankind degrade.”

[An earlier version of this essay was published as "Open Forum: Arts Education: 'Without Fear or Favor'" (ATHENews 6.1 [February 1992]: 3).]