Edumacation

September always feels like the actual New Year to me: it’s back to school season; I’ve typically recently turned another year older, a new concert season has launched … and of course with back to school comes another new contingent of piano students who are eager to learn, and whom I’m eager to teach.

Last week I saw a post on studying the arts at the higher ed level going viral. I reached out to Karl Paulnack, the author of the post, to ask if I could share it here, and he told me that he’d actually written that address exactly 20 years ago. And that it’s gone viral multiple times over the past 2 decades.

Frankly, I’m not surprised. Over the last 2 decades I, along with many of my colleagues, have been extoling the benefits of why children should study music, why music should be available in the public-school systems, why the government should be funding the arts, and why the arts are an important part of a cultural identity.

(My news feed at this very moment is filled with arts organizations folding due to a lack of funding. My heart goes out to the musicians of the KW Symphony in particular).

 Despite our convictions about the importance of the arts, I along with many of my colleagues, seem to have a hard time putting into words exactly why it is so important.

I got to thinking, is it because we are artists, and our brains have so been changed by the arts, that the reasons have become a part of us like a 6th sense? An extra limb? A superfluous nipple?

Why is it that I don’t invest myself into the research that shows an artist’s brain has developed differently than other brains? That people who’ve studied music one-on-one make better employees/problem solvers/team players?

Furthermore, as an educator, don’t I have that much more responsibility to share this information with my students and their parents? To become an ambassador in this country (Canada – I’m talking to you!) for the importance of the arts?

Paulnack’s address came up during my discussion with Alaina Viau while we were recording an episode for Loose Tea’s podcast The Compassionate Revolution (episode 9) in which I shared that it seems to me. as someone who has lived in 6 different countries on 3 different continents, that Canada has rather given up on the arts and artists in the international playing field.

I noted that a country like Kazakhstan, who had moved its capital city to Astana 10 short years before I arrived there, invested an enormous number of resources into building an opera house alongside its state-of-the-art stadium/arena, because it understood that a country starts to make an impact when it puts the arts first.

Astana Opera

Here in our own capital city, our opera house closed in 2015 and there are no longer opportunities for the city’s residents to watch full-scale opera productions. Why are we so slow in our country to defend the importance of the arts? Is it because we’ve become accustomed to being intubated with entertainment instead and accept that entertainment as a substitute for the arts?

What stood out to me in Paulnack’s address was this:

The arts are what we turn to in crisis, in moments of need, in the wake of trauma.

We turn to arts, to share in combined human experience. We turn to the ARTS. We do not turn to entertainment to numb and make the pain go away. We turn to the arts to find meaning. To find community. To find hope.

And what happens when we turn to the arts early in our development, while already in grade school?

We learn that when we apply ourselves to solving a problem, even an uncomfortable one, we can come up with a unique creative solution. And when we realize we came up with that solution ourselves, on our own, we realize we can come up with creative solutions in other areas of our lives and studies as well.

And that, in turn, builds our confidence to try new things.

Well, there you have it. I suppose I’ve finally composed my personal argument for making space for the arts in public education. What’s yours? Comment below!

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