Where Have All the Arts Gone?

After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the National Defense Education Act of 1958 turned the American education system into a training ground for the scientists and engineers required to make America #1 in the arms and space races. We won both races. But even as Americans walked on the moon in 1969, the vision of the American education system had grown so narrow that the education establishment was not prepared to meet the challenges of the cultural revolution in the sixties. By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, illiteracy had reached epidemic proportions.

The one constant in education reform throughout the last half of the twentieth century was the denigration of arts and humanities. By 2000, more than thirty thousand years of what it means to be human had been reduced in most schools to an occasional elective. A bias against dissent and innovation permeated the education system. America had become its worst enemy.

With the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the obsession with testing became law.
Teachers could no longer close their doors against the folly. Collusion was mandatory.

In the Race to the Top competition, $4.35 billion went to the eleven states and District of Columbia who thought inside Mr. Duncan’s box. That box narrows the vision of our education system to preparing children to “compete in the global economy” and giving merit pay to teachers whose students score well on tests. Collusion is now our bottom line.

Along with the dehumanization of school curriculum, the bias against dissent and innovation that permeates our education system is a disturbing contradiction in a nation that sees itself as the global exemplar and defender of democracy and human rights.