It’s a sad headline to have to write, but it’s absolutely true. Arts education does continue to suffer in Oregon. It suffers from a lack of money, which comes from a lack of caring on the part of everyday people in our state. Don’t blame the politicians – they’re making hard decisions, and all other things being equal (which they’re decidedly not) they will cut those programs which they feel no one will be that sad to see go. I’m not at all surprised by this political reality – it’s hardly out of the norm, and it has been this way for as long as I can remember.
I keep thinking that there’s something more that we as performers can do to illustrate the short-sightedness of these funding cuts to arts education, but we just “play” music. It’s not a vocation, it’s an avocation. We presumably do it for fun, not for profit, surely – and even if it has some benefit for our audiences, they’re just a bunch of elitist snobs who hold their noses high as they walk through Bridgeport Village or the Collections section of Nordstrom. Sometimes I’m amazed that we have any organized system of culture in this country. First and foremost America is the land of people who work hard, earn as much money as they can, and then retire and die. Earning is job one. Learning is necessary to start earning. Anything else is secondary, or even tertiary.
You can throw any number of studies at people, demonstrating the positive and demonstrable effects of arts education on brain development and, gods be praised, test scores. But it will still always be more recreation than an act of “real” creation, i.e. a good or service that can be exchanged for material goods or currency. People shout from the rooftops about the “coarsening of American society and entertainment”, but these same people never stop to think about the fact that the fine arts are the most direct and lasting counter to this trend. They’re called the “fine” arts, and not the “coarse” arts for a reason.
I know that times are tough, but we’re talking about the coming generations, here. Can’t we have our kids learning about music from somewhere other than Guitar Hero? I hope so.
Marked Absent: Many Oregon students will do without music and art classes – The Oregonian