Arts Education: How Shakespeare Theatre and the Folger Are Getting It Right

On Twitter this week, Shakespeare Theatre asked its followers what they thought of Anne Midgette's recent Washington Post piece on arts education.  I was going to respond on Twitter, but realized I had more than 140 characters' worth of thoughts. 

Arts education is a big interest of mine.  I've been an opera fanatic since the age of 11 (no, really, I'm serious), and I consider it a personal mission to get other young people interested in the arts.  My plot plan to get my nieces and nephew (six, four, and two) hooked on opera is proceeding nicely.  So I was very interested to read Anne Midgette's article. 

The article left me with mixed feelings.  It was encouraging to read about the renewed interest in and emphasis on arts education.  But I came away from the piece somewhat concerned about the quality of that education.

Consider this description of a school visit by Yo Yo Ma and Damian Woetzel:

Ma finally begins playing his cello — with the Savoy kids, not for them. Together with Damian Woetzel, the ballet-dancer-turned-arts-activist, he follows a template they have used in other schools: Four chosen kids declaim things that make them unique, while Ma plays cello riffs under and between the words.

"Four chosen kids declaim things that make them unique, while Ma plays cello riffs under and between the words."  That's just silly. What on earth does that have to do with teaching kids about the arts?  Midgette continues:

Ma himself represents several interests: providing a role model for the children, a sign of community, national concern for a struggling school and a way for WPAS to show its involvement. But he also represents, in this classroom, a rather vague definition of “art,” and it’s hard to tell exactly what this performance adds up to. (emphasis mine)

It is hard to tell.  Presumably the goal of arts education is to expose kids to art with the hope of cultivating in them an attachment to the arts.  But to do that, you have to expose them to actual art.  Ma playing cello riffs is only arts exposure in the most tangential sense.  While he did go on to eventually play a very brief piece by Saint-Saëns, just three or so minutes of classical music seems a bit of a waste of a visit from one of the most talented cellists in the world. 

The main emphasis here also seemed to be on the children, rather than on the art.  Now, arts education should absolutely be "hands on," of course.  I'm not suggesting children should just sit and listen (I fondly remember dancing at home to The Magic Flute as a child in my own fusion of ballet and interpretive dance).  But the focus should be on fostering the children's entry into something bigger than themselves, not using art as a background for talking about one's own uniqueness.  Getting the children to pretend to be animals as they are treated to a performance of Carnival of the Animals?  Well, I can see that fostering a long-term connection with the music.  Using a world-class cellist as background noise?  Not so much.

While I think the focus of the visit should have been mainly on Woetzel and Ma performing and interacting with and teaching the students, I like the idea of the students' performing something in return.  But I wanted to groan when I read that they performed Michael Jackson's "Thriller."  I like pop (some of it, that is), but again, what is this doing as part of an arts education curriculum?  Schools don't need to teach kids about pop music or popular culture -- kids learn that themselves.  Schools need to teach kids about high culture -- art, theatre, classical music, opera, dance.  Kids don't have a pop culture deficiency; they do have a high culture deficiency.  And "Thriller" is not going to create kids who will fill the concert houses and opera halls of tomorrow.

Midgette notes that "Some arts organizations will have to confront the fact that their audiences are declining because of an irrevocable shift in the culture, rather than simply a lack of education."  While I partially agree with that statement -- I think the high arts are valued less by the culture than they once were, which can't help but have an effect -- I don't think that "irrevocable shift" necessarily has to be irrevocable.  At the very least, I don't think audience decline has to be irrevocable.  (Maybe that's the blind optimism of youth talking, but I hope not.) 

Too often today the assumption is that some great art is just too difficult, too inaccessible for children (witness "translations" of Shakespeare -- shudder!).  But I think people are selling kids short.  Kids aren't dumb.  Of course you can't teach a child a Shakespeare play or an opera the way you would teach it to a highschooler or to an adult, but you can teach it to them.    

I think there are two D.C. groups who really demonstrate this in their education programs: Shakespeare Theatre and the Folger Theatre.  Instead of assuming that Shakespeare's language is too difficult for children, his plays too complex, both groups assume that kids are capable of being wooed by his language and enthralled by his characters.  Then they focus on giving the kids the tools they need to engage with the work.  That's the approach all arts education should be taking.  There is no category of great art that can't be accessed by kids if they're given the tools to engage with it. 

It's encouraging to see that, as Midgette's piece reports, arts education is becoming a priority.  But the article made me realize that getting arts education into schools is just a part of the battle.  If kids aren't being exposed to and given the tools they need to connect to great art, then arts education isn't going to do much to fill the theatres, concert halls, and opera houses of tomorrow.