2012 conventions 2012 election 2013 session 2013 special election arts arts and culture author ballot measures basketball bomb books boy scouts budget bullying business charlie hales children clackamas climate change coal college courts crime culture culture club democrats drugs economy education environment family film fluoride food gay rights guns handguns health health care health insurance high school history housing immigration international internet kitzhaber law legislature lgbt literary arts living marijuana marriage media medicine mental health military minor parties mohamed mohamud movies music native americans news newspaper obama olympics oregon our town parenting pers photography police politcs politics port portland portland business journal president prevention public safety religion republicans rnc romney rural salem sam adams sandy hook schools science shooting sports suicide supreme court taxes television terrorism theater third parties transportation union university of oregon washington wildfire women

The evidence connecting arts to success in academics is unequivocal.  It is ridiculous that we are still having that debate.  A wonderful summary of the evidence can be found on the Americans for the Arts website.

A great resource for teachers interested in integrating more arts into their classroom curricula is ArtsEdge, a project of the Kennedy Center.  Portland would also be a great pilot city for the Any Given Child program, a program that assesses a community's arts needs and how artists and arts groups can collaborate to deliver comprehensive arts education for the whole community.

posted 2 years, 12 months ago
view in context

We have to have a paradigm shift when thinking about the arts in schools.  We have to stop thinking about it as such a seperate curriculum.  We need to train teachers to use the arts to enhance the "more academic" areas of the curriculum, like literacy and science.  When children use the arts to learn, they develop important skills that go far beyond knowing facts.

We have a lot of problems that lie ahead for Portland and Oregon as a whole, and we're going to need creative people to solve them (to say nothing of creating beautiful artworks that help us transcend those problems).

posted 2 years, 12 months ago
view in context

Ok, so I've said a lot about how important creativity and the arts are to the mechanics of a functioning society.  And indeed this is the focus when attention turns towards funding for the arts.  But there is something to be said for the importance of l'art pour l'art. Part of what makes Portland so awesome is the ubiquitous art culture here.  From the walls of every coffee shop, to the stages of every hipster bar, to the stages of the big theatres, Portland enjoys a rich culture of quality art by local artists.  It's part not only of what makes Portland the unique municipality it is but also what gives an otherwise monotonous existence meaning, intrigue, interest.  In addition to public figures and the like having the cognitive capacity for solving problems in creative and novel ways, we're also going to want our fair share of beauty makers.

So the question remains - why leave art in the schools?  Well, unfortunately for most students it's simply the only place they have access to it.  Art has been shown to dramatically lessen the academic achievement gap between children of different socio-economic groups, and so it is so often that the children who would benefit most from arts education in school are often the first to be forced to go without, while students in private schools enjoy the arts activities that will inevitably enable them to succeed academically, attend good colleges, become involved and self sustaining citizens.  Ubiquitous arts education - arts integration into the curricula of every public school - is one major step to ending this cycle of correlative inherited wealth and success in life.  There are groups in town, including the NPO I work for, that try to bring arts education to schools that have removed the arts from curricula, that try to create access to the arts for children who otherwise don't have access to creative experiences.  But our resources are limited. 

Sorry, this was a bit rambling.  But this is a very important and misunderstood issue - and I'm grateful that it is being addressed.  Thank you.



posted 3 years ago
view in context

Language, science and art share a common origin.  The ancestor of Cuneiform and Native American petroglyphs is art.  Speaking and the phonetics of language emerged from ancient singing.  Many Greek philosophers ascribed to the idea that the beauty - indeed the aesthetic beauty - of the earth was based in mathematical elegance. Greek statues reflect this.  As Hegel posits, these statues weren't created as the museum prisoners they are today: they embodied a certain worldview and played an important role in religious, public and scientific life.  The correlation between the evolution of science and human knowledge and the evolution of art is not mere coincidence; art and science, in learning, in practice, in research are intricately and symbiotically connected.  It's become something of (unfortunately) a platitude - but music is a manifestation of complex mathematics, physics and acoustics.  Painting and sculpture are expressions of optics, chemistry.  That these mediums also have the ability to elicit and express complex human emotions, comment on difficult cultural issues and reveal mysteries of the human condition is simply a beautiful icing on a very academic cake. 

We no longer live in a society of artists and non-artists.  Art and creativity plays a vital role in professions ranging from law to politics to business to technology.  Creating smart phone applications or designing eco-efficient transportation are creative endeavors - they just require a different set of technical skills to create than, say, the technique needed to play a piano concerto or write a novel.  The world is changing at an exponential rate; the future and the myriad problems and challenges it surely holds will require creativity, ingenuity and a capacity to think beyond spread sheets.  Global warming, the economic crisis, military violence, third world development - all of these problems will require extremely creative solutions.   A great deal of insight can be gained from information - but what to do with information, how to use to improve civilization and leave the world better than one finds it requires a deeply-rooted (cognitively) capacity for creativity.  Leaving art out of the public school system would be leaving the generations that will inherit this city would be a tremendous tragedy for the future and sustainability of Portland.



posted 3 years ago
view in context

I work for a local arts NPO that focuses on creating access to the arts of children.  A lot of our work is focused on bringing the arts in schools that have been forced to cut funding for arts programs and materials.

Before I say a few words on the importance of the arts in education and the current predicament we find ourselves in, it's worth noting that the arts facing a crisis in funding and proving their worth is pretty par for the course in the arts world.  Growing up in the Midwest 10 years ago, our high school arts programs were all threatened with cuts (one relatively difficult year the orchestra program was suspended while the high school spend >$100k in automated garbage cans for the cafeteria).  Arts education is tough and robust - it is very used to going with the ups and downs of the economy, as it always seems the first to be in peril.  This is because art is so deeply embedded in who we are as humans and a society that it can weather the most perfect of storms.  With that caveat, however, there are things unique about the current situation we face.

What a great deal of the population doesn't realize is that art is really what drives our culture and our economy.  Not necessarily art as an esoteric medium of expression, such as the symphony or the ballet, but as the urge to innovate and to create that manifests itself in everything from innovative policy to novel urban planning solutions to major advances in technology.  We have an unfortunate tendency in this culture to think of "arts education" as some sort of isolated track in our school systems; hence the cyclical cuts to arts ed funding.  In reality, the arts are a way, a means of learning subjects and mastering skills across the curriculum.  Research showing the benefits of the arts in literacy and mathematics competency is ubiquitous and definitive - but the arts go far beyond simply aiding in learning the systems, processes and facts of math, english and science.  The arts help children to discover and understand - and to then internalize and express their ideas about subjects across the curriculum.  Practicing the arts is as much about acquiring critical and abstract thinking skills, learning to express yourself, solving problems and working together as it is about making aesthetic objects.  Through art we learn what learning is and how to learn.

posted 3 years ago
view in context