Education is hurt by mainstream cost-cutting
Art is not seen as an essential service to be paid for, but instead as a luxury
Recently, I chatted with a few arts education professionals in Hamilton, and I noticed a troubling, but not terribly surprising, sentiment among them. Art, while being an incredible asset to developing minds, is not prioritized in public schooling, and alternative options aren’t necessarily widely known or affordable.
Hamilton houses an impressive array of arts education resources that offer far more than the standard stream.
The Hamilton Academy of Performing Arts offers full-time programming for grades 3-12, which involves a hybrid of academic and arts schooling. In addition to all of their regular subjects, students learn the discipline, traditions, and skills of classical performance arts such as ballet and vocals throughout their elementary and high school careers.
But, not every family interested in sending their kids to alternative institutions can afford the upwards of $15,000 in annual fees required by the likes of the HAPA, and cooperation between independent educators and the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board is apparently lacking.
Programs that have formerly taken advantage of the expertise of professional artists and performers in Hamilton through organizational partnerships have ultimately foregone the skill and talent of specialists in favour of utilizing school board staff. In favour, I have to assume, of saving money.
It certainly is convenient to deny the importance of actual artists teaching arts, when the school board doesn’t want to pay them for the value of their skills.
I had the great fortune of attending an arts high school in Mississauga, which offers four areas of creative study: visual arts, music, drama, and dance. Students who were accepted into one of these programs attended classes in their chosen specialties each semester. And the classes were taught by — you guessed it — professional fine and performing artists.
On the contrary, my grade 10 history class was taught by a gym teacher who couldn’t figure out how to superimpose a map of Canada onto another map of Canada on the projector. We hollered, “90 degrees counterclockwise! No, no, that’s clockwise!” It is one of the great demoralizing memories of my youth.
Being taught history by this guy would have been akin to being taught to paint by a sloth. And, no offence intended to those school board teachers who do their best to cover subjects they don’t specialize in, but the only people qualified to teach arts subjects are artists.
The arts, as my new friends at the HAPA sadly note, are too often seen as frivolous, rather than fundamental. Instead of recognizing that learning and practicing an art form with all of its principles and repetitions establishes basic discipline and respect for traditional modes of learning, mainstream educators teach the arts as an aside.
I think this is a reflection of the severe undervaluing of arts careers, which pushes many artists into other methods of moneymaking, thereby allowing arts education to be undervalued. This, in turn, discourages students from taking the prospect of an arts career seriously, and the whole thing repeats, ad infinitum. It’s a chicken and egg conundrum.
Art is not seen as an essential service to be paid for, but instead as a luxury, but suggesting that art is not a critical part of a functioning society is like claiming that a person can live without a beating heart.
Education is not about direct financial reward. Its primary purpose is to produce the aware, critically thinking, and inspired minds that will one day, in theory, lead a progressive society. Arts education is not only for future working artists — beyond technical skill, talent, and discipline, art is about ideas, and a life spent in ignorance of art is one deprived of much creative and intellectual thought.
Teaching the arts like they don’t matter is a grave mistake for society overall.