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The Fourth "R" in Education
Reading, WRiting, ARithmetic and ARt By Alexandra York |
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THE FOURTH "R" IN EDUCATION:  ike life, musical passages contain highs and lows, fast and slows, and musical vocabulary includes dissonance and resolution, tumult and sublimity, all emboldening a student in the process of making music to feel to his hearts content within the security of a confined experience. There is no way to fall out of control because the rhythm keeps the music going - the notes must be played on time and accurately - affording an expansive opportunity to learn to channel emotions into a finite structure with a finite time limit. By learning to orchestrate emotional content through so rigorous a structure, the student must learn to merge reason and emotions; otherwise, the resulting music will be cold and sterile, math without the poetry. Classical music is too mentally commanding to permit the flailing and screaming incited by rock n' roll, thus it forces young people to control their emotional output, offering them the experience of cathexis rather than catharsis. Also, because music deals with broad abstractions - triumph, defeat, love, loss - it allows a young person to personalize universals of the human condition, to feel on a grand scale both the hope and the hurt that necessarily accompany an individual life fully lived. For teenagers, in particular, it unlocks gateways to mature excursions into the ecstacy and the vulnerability of love, the headiness and the hazards of risk. Often, once young people begin to understand the value of classical music, they turn to it in moments of emotional need to help them experience deep stirrings that may not make it to the surface of consciousness by themselves. Repressed boys, especially, can benefit immensely from music study.So we begin to see the vital importance of art education, the invigorating and reinforcing spiral of experience inherent in learning the various art forms. Back and forth, from real life to art, from art form to art form and back to real life, the senses, the intellect and the emotions flow together, charging each other along the way with images, sounds and ideas. Students of art become students of life. And this should be our goal. Once they experience the arduous bliss of making art, some will pursue it as a profession, of course. But the purpose of art study is not to make artists out of our young people; it is to help them become complete human beings. Youth is forward motion. And the arts can forever inspire this forward motion because they are open ended and can continue indefinitely to absorb our natural creative energies. No art form can ever be entirely mastered because the techniques can always be further expanded and exploited, so skills and appreciation learned while we are still chronologically young can serve us our whole lives long. As we grow and develop as human beings, we can continue for a lifetime stretching our capabilities through artistic expression, if only as a casual hobby or through spectator appreciation on a high level. Our bodies will age and our physical prowess (in sports, for example) will diminish, but our minds and our imaginations need never grow old. Practical knowledge of the arts can keep us forever active mentally, psychologically and emotionally, learning, growing, advancing... the very hallmarks of youth. Let us insist that our children be offered these priceless opportunities provided by art education. Whether they want it or not. Mandatory, remember? My own father used to tell me it was his responsibility as a parent to "introduce" me - that meant I had to do it - to certain things in life that would help me become a worthy human being. I began ballet at three, piano at five, acting at seven, and voice (on my own) in college - Making up stories and plays I always did on my own. I was required to bring home one book a week from the library throughout grade school - Did you know that the girl detective Nancy Drew is still on the shelves? My brother and I were required to taste everything set out on the dinner table. If we weren't fond of some particular food, we could ask our mother for a "courtesy helping," which meant one level tablespoon. If we made a face or said something negative, we got another tablespoon - I remember eating a whole bowl of parsnips that way one night - until we learned to acquire a taste for the flavor or at least moderate our behavior. Today, there is not a single food I do not savor. It is my observation, these days, that many parents are afraid of their children. You don't need to beat children into doing what's best for them, you can negotiate something you want for them with something they want for themselves. You do, however, need to inculcate the habit of cooperation in them while you're still bigger than they are! In my early childhood I hated piano, but if I wanted dance lessons (which I loved) I had to stick with piano as well. When, in my mid - teens, I finally terminated music lessons, I was glad - as I am now - that I could entertain myself by playing the instrument respectably and appreciate others' playing of it as well. Another observation, obvious to anyone, is that parents (and even grandparents) today emulate their children instead of setting examples for them. By dressing like kids in jeans, sneakers and message tee shirts, wearing baseball caps during dinner, reducing their own vocabularies to mindless street jargon - "hey," "cool," "no problem," "Hi guys," - by listening incessantly to blaring primitive music, what do parents think they are offering their children regarding the refinements of adulthood? - a state of achieved maturity that they, by the way, are pathetically missing themselves. No wonder America has become a nation of aging adolescents! I suggest to you that the nation's schools could not have failed, as they have, unless mothers and fathers failed first by abdicating their parental responsibility as guardians of their children's inner development. Now, it is past time for concerned parents to assume their obligation as parents and set the standards for the education of their own children. Art education is crucial. It can be taught privately, of course, but instituting it into school systems, public or otherwise, is not as formidable as you might think. There are hundreds of prototype parent groups all over the country doing just this by forming nonprofit organizations that fundraise and contribute money to schools targeted only for the purpose of incorporating the arts into the curricula. If anyone wants specific information on this, please do not hesitate to contact me personally. Finally, may I say that although Americans largely do not understand this, art is not a luxury, it is a necessity ... a spiritual one. At its apotheosis aesthetically, philosophically and psychologically, art provides a spiritual summation by integrating mind and matter - abstract values perceived by the senses. When form and content are exquisitely unified in art to express the most universal truths via the most beautiful physical presentation in the most technically proficient manner, art offers an experience of complete concinnity, a harmoniously integrated experience of mind, body and soul - both to its maker and to its worthy beholder. Thus it is the very souls of our emotionally abandoned, value starved youth that we can rescue through art education. For it is art that best teaches the moral imagination everywhere apparent in the different art forms, through which the soul of the artist, young or old, professional or amateur or student, is revealed. But, just like the star fish, we can rescue them only one at a time, for every child like every adult is a precious, fragile, unrepeatable, individual being. Shan't we nourish each soul with the beauty, the wonder and the delight of the mind as carefully as we nourish each body with bread, milk and honey? The thirteenth-century Persian poet Muslih-uddin Sadi counseled us thus: If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft And from thy slender store Two loaves alone to thee are left Sell one, and with the dole Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul. Yes! It is the beauty of art and the arts of beauty that feed the human spirit by making the invisible visible and the visible more visible, affirming the value of visions, visions that bring values to life. Art and the moral imagination? Art is the moral imagination.
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 Edgar Jerins Venus  Evangelos Frudakis Reaching |
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