cover image The Muses Go to School: Conversations About the Necessity of Arts in Education

The Muses Go to School: Conversations About the Necessity of Arts in Education

Edited by Herbert Kohl and Tom Oppenheim. New Press, $26.95 (240p) ISBN 978-1-59558-539-4

Inspired by the work of the Stella Adler Outreach Division, one of whose goals is “to bring free actor training to low-income inner-city youth,” this collection of interviews with 10 artists connected with the theater and the responses of 10 educators, all of whom might well be described as reformers and activists involved in “issues of education, justice, and the arts,” is a broad summons to recognize the arts as “central to a good education.” Through recollections of their own discoveries and of students whose lives they saw transformed, they offer diverse experiences except for one thing—that the arts opened new worlds. For Bill T. Jones, it was a drama teacher; for Rosie Perez, a performance of “The Wiz changed my life”; for Frances Lucerna, it was a parish church summer program. Nevertheless, as Oppenheim reports, “the arts have been virtually eliminated from public education throughout the United States.” While Whoopi Goldberg speaks of growing up “in a world with music and art and going to museums,” Diane Ravitch’s response takes note of “the precipitous... decline in spending for arts education services.... in Whoopi’s hometown, [as] the mayor decided to stake his legacy on raising test scores in reading and math.” Into the current debates about the means and ends of public education, these conversations form a softly spoken but urgent argument that as Kohl says, “The arts are not just for people who become artists.” (Mar.)