Don't Cut The Arts
This is AM with your CC (listen on the radio this Tuesday!)
A controversial decision is on the table for the Eureka City Schools next Tuesday, and it could hurt music education for middle school kids.
Set for their June Twenty Third board meeting, the officials will decide whether or not to combine the middle school and high school jazz programs into one group, this would put students in the 6th to 8th grades into a group with high school students. The reason for this proposal is because the middle school jazz band did not get very many people signing up.
Right now we have two problems.
First is that the cure is worse than the disease. The level of musicianship for those in elementary school compared to those in high school is dramatically different. When competing against high school kids, combining these class levels will go one of two ways, either the jazz standards will be drastically dumbed down for the wide variety of skills, which means nobody learns very much, or the standards will be so advanced that most of the elementary school kids fill fail the material and be let down in the classroom. Neither of these options is acceptable.
Secondly the middle school jazz program has a great history of forming the future musicians of this county. Cutting such a program just because of a temporary enrollment issue will only negatively affect future generations of students pursuing the arts in Eureka.
It’s been pointed out that this decision to combine is a long term decision to ultimately cut additional jazz band programs. The argument is that if you vote to set up a program for future failure, then you can later announce that the high school program should also be cut because it isn’t working out.
Some of the more passionate citizens of this topic are pointing out that making such cuts in the name of saving money is balancing budgets on the backs of the students. I looked into this, and there is a bit of truth to it, if what I am reading is correct, the salaries that we are seeing show school administrators making 2 to even over three hundred thousand dollars in pay and benefits each year.
While I am not a tax the rich type, that’s a lot of money and it may not be the best look for admin to recommend cuts to music and arts while rocking such high salaries. Middle School Jazz Programs are worth the investment. Seems that there is still enough money to go around so that the kids can have music in school.
Stepping back for a broader look, I think school administration officials will have difficult decisions to make across America as Artificial Intelligence exponentially grows -- gobbling up many careers that were once viable. While A.I. can even make art and music, there is endless data on the value of the arts in education. If we strip away the arts and then take our best shot at predicting the educational future of what our younger people need, I guarantee you that we will get it wrong. We will completely fail our kids.
(These two men, Aristotle and Plato are WAY smarter than me, and they agree!)
Aristotle remarked that education should be a mixture of music and physical activity. I think there is a lot of depth to this, the mind needs a strong body and it also needs the shaping that comes from creativity. When you and i went to school we had to learn many math concepts that most of us never used in the course of our lives. We had to memorize many facts in history that were useless as we lacked learning the context of these very facts.
Education as currently offered is falling very short in the wake of Artificial Intelligence. If anything the AI is a crutch in the classroom, curbing the critical thinking that comes from long hours of considered studying. The education gained from music and arts goes to the very shaping of the intellect, something that calculus and random history memorizing doesn’t. We can still educate mathematicians but most people will just have AI do their higher level math. The enrichment that happens in music education is a whole higher level of impact.
That’s why its so important. We don’t want our schools to turn out zombies to phone screens, we want well rounded people that will make the world a better place.
America needs to fully account for how Artificial Intelligence is changing what’s important in education. It gets to the fundamental question: What does it mean to be human?