WHY MUSIC 2?

The arts are central to how we see ourselves, what we believe about

ourselves, and how we present ourselves to each other. The arts are

especially important in a complex democracy like ours. Democracy

offers the promise of equal participation to hundreds of cultural

traditions that shape our landscape - Native American, Asian,

European, Black, and Hispanic - and this promise translates into an

endless process of negotiation and accommodation. Art represents a

place in which borrowing, blending, and sharing can really work.

It's time we realized just how much our future depends on how well we

integrate the magic and creativity of the arts into the lives of

future generations, and that process must begin by ensuring that the

arts are essential learning for all children. But to know how far we

have to go, we have to understand how far we've come. Let's take a

brief look at some milestones in education over the last four decades.

In the 1950s, faced with Sputnik and our competition with the Russian

space program, Americans recognized the importance of science and math

and took decisive steps to improve standards in our schools. In the

1960s, our nation placed special emphasis on health through exercise

and took steps to raise the level of physical fitness among our

school-age children. By the late 1970s, we began to realize that

along with scientific knowledge and physical fitness, we needed to

feed the imaginations of students with the arts. Reports and studies

called for Americans to "come to our senses" and include the arts as

part of basic education. But in the early 1980s, we were still

grappling with the problem. An education report declared that the

United States was "a nation at risk" and that there was a "rising tide

of mediocrity" in our schools.

By the late 1980s, Congress mandated that the National Endowment for

the Arts report on the status of arts education. Then, in its 1988

report "Toward Civilization," the Endowment stated that arts education

in our schools was in triple jeopardy: (1) the arts were not taken

seriously as important subject matter; (2) arts education programs

were focused almost exclusively on production and performance and

rarely included history, critical judgement, or aesthetics; and (3)

there was no common agreement as to what all students should know and

be able to do in the arts.

Where are we now? Actually we've made enormous strides. In 1992, the

Endowment joined forces with the Department of Education and our

sister agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities, to fund a

two-year project for defining what all students - from Kindergarten

through twelfth grade - should know and be able to do in the arts.

The project, of course, resulted in the development of our national

voluntary standards in the arts.

MENC managed the standards development process for the Consortium of

National Arts Education Associations. Following the 1994 signing into

law of the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, the first federal

legislation to declare the arts a "core" subject, the consortium was

the first group to present its voluntary national standards to the

secretary of education.

An assessment framework for the arts was completed in 1994, and an

arts assessment of America's eighth graders was completed in 1997 and

reported in November 1998 in the Nation's Report Card on the Arts -

the first such report in nearly 20 years. MENC has been an important

partner in this effort.

We're experiencing an abundance of policy development in favor of arts

education. To these accomplishments, we can add more and more

research that supports what those of us in the arts have known for

years: education in the arts improves the intellectual, emotional, and

social development of our children.

Today, if we are going to move the arts agenda forward, we must work

together - policymakers at the state and local levels, business and

private communities, parents and private citizens, and cultural arts

institutions and artists. And, most certainly, we must have the

commitment and full participation of our schools - the arts

specialists, as well as classroom teachers, principals, and

administrative leaders.

All these sectors must work together to put arts into the basic

curriculum, not just in magnet schools or in high schools as

electives, but as a comprehensive, sequential curriculum taught by

qualified teachers, beginning with preschool instruction and

continuing with required courses for high school graduation - and

beyond.

We all know that standards and partnerships alone don't guarantee that

all students will have high-quality arts education programs in their

schools. We must all be advocates for the arts. Each of us must make

sure that boards of education provide the necessary time,

instructional resources, and appropriate, qualified teachers.

As we take stock of our accomplishments of the past, we must make sure

that we are preparing our children for the challenges of the future.

We must also make sure that we have nurtured the creativity of our

children, because it's our creativity that has made this nation the

strongest economic, military, and technological power on earth. The

arts are central to maintaining our national strength. They are

central to democracy because they embody America's living cultural

heritage.

Source: "The Arts Are Basic" by Bill Ivey, published in Teaching

Music, vol. 6 no. 6, June 1999.