Having worked for many years as a professional musician, and now being fairly active as the publisher of educational programs for orchestras, I often run into a quote in the business literature that goes something like this: "studies have shown that students with arts education do better in other academic courses."
I thought this was a very interesting bit of data, and I did some digging on it and I found this article:
http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~colman/eisner.pdf
Which, basically, says this is not true.
I didn’t really need to read this article to know this. After all, if you took any 10 American Idol finalists and put them in a room with 10 tone deaf rhythm-challenged high school nerds, and had them all take some version of an SAT test, which of these two groups do you think would show greater academic ability? Hopefully, we don’t have to go through such a painful proceeding know the most likely answer to that question.
Part of the problem is that it is very very hard to do a truly scientific study on this, as you would have to take two identical groups of kids, sets of twins maybe, and somehow give them identical academic experiences for several years, but you have to deny one group any access to music or painting or sculpture or dance, and then see how they do on a math test. I doubt that any sane parent would allow their child to be put into such a program.
But the science of it aside, what really troubles me about this is the fact that this faux scientific data is bandied about so much in promotional literature in the music world. The people who are writing the promotional literature will quote such factoids thinking it helps their cause, when in fact it really hurts it.
I think it is time that we all sat down and called a spade a spade, and accepted the fact that people who promulgate this information have an ax to grind. I am not against arts education, nor am I against people making money by providing instruments and method books and all the other materials. But let’s face it: from printing textbooks, to building school buildings, providing education is a business. Big business. And all too often, these vague claims of the advantages of music education in schools sound terribly hollow, as they are really a reflection of a commercial interest in selling more products in their market niche. It is a blatant attempt to prey upon the fear of parents that their kid will fall behind the neighbor’s kid in getting into an Ivy League school. It smacks of desperation.
Please understand, I am not advocating taking away Timmy’s trumpet. In fact, what is called for here is a major redoubling of effort in terms of understanding the importance of arts in everyone’s life. But right now the conversation is dominated by people who have an economic agenda of moving product right now, and between that and the faux science that they are quoting, the whole argument sounds specious and doesn’t really serve the ultimate goals that I think all of us really are trying to reach.
Instead of "selling" arts education as a way to get a little bit of an edge against your nearest academic competitor, I hope that someday we start to think of it as something that has merit on its face, whether it helps any other part of your academic career or not. Performance skills are useful skills to have. The joy experienced in painting, even doing a lousy painting, or in knowing how to dance, has its own intrinsic value. It is a marvelously effective medium for enhancing social cohesion between people that are otherwise separated by other social and economic factors. The active participation in artistic enterprises is an issue of the our collective quality-of-life, right up there with garbage collection and zoning codes.
The people who are economically dependent on selling the paint brushes cannot be counted upon to be objective in their discussion of the need for arts education. And if you are going to make an argument that the arts somehow makes you smarter, if making that argument makes you look like you don’t understand basic scientific analysis and statistics, it is somewhat self-defeating, n’est pas?
© Justin Locke
