Thinking Critically and Finding Answers: The Benefits of Arts Education

In Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Ann Hulbert warned against the problem with advocating for arts education by citing its ability to help kids perform well in other areas, particularly on the "testable" areas of education. A recent study released by the Dana Foundation explored the connections between arts education and coginition. Here, we've invited Mark Cooper, co-author of Making Art Together: How Collaborative Art-Making Can Transform Kids, Classrooms, and Communities, to discuss how he feels an education in the visual arts benefits students.

In my experience, arts education provides a format for students to think critically, ask questions, and ultimately, find their own answers. This is especially true for students with little or no art making background in that much of their education revolves around the acquisition of other skills, retention of facts, and meeting specific expectations. Arts education provides a different model and when it succeeds, an ability to "think outside of the box." 

A principal component to succeeding in the creation of an art object is the process of developing an idea about what is desired to be communicated and how best to do so. There are generalities that often hold true; but, the minute a rule is made, someone breaks it in an interesting way. I always encourage students to look at how other artists, from the past and from their moment, problem solve and articulate their ideas. I encourage them to study history, learn from it, and expand upon it, to become "masters of their media," able to make educated decisions and trust their instincts. I help them look to the past as well as the present for ways to enter the dialogue that mirrors their own interests. 

Media, Technology and Bullying: New Partners in Nastiness

by Mara Sapon-Shevin

When I was in middle-school, the way the “popular kids” tormented those of us who weren’t so lucky, was through something called “Slam Books.” A popular kid (it was usually a girl) would start a notebook with individual pages headed with the names of unpopular students. The book would be passed around to the other “popular” kids and they would take turns making nasty entries under the unpopular students’ names. Under Beth’s name, for example, they would write, “Ugly,” “Bad complexion,” “Stupid,” and “Slutty.”

There would be lots of snickering and giggling as the notebook was passed (not that unobstrusively) between the popular kids who were writing the nasty comments. Slam books were the source of public humiliation, and they made the lives of some of us miserable. It was never clear whether or not teachers were aware of what was going on, but I don’t remember any intervention at the time.

Now, however, we have entered the era of high technology, and the ways in which students torment one another are far more sophisticated. Cyberbullying is a growing and distressing phenomenon that has recently received extensive media attention.

Link Roundup: Seed Vaults, Marriage, Reproduction, Updates

"Near Arctic, Seed Vault Is a Fort Knox of Food", in the New York Times last week, discussed the efforts to create a seed repository as a backup of our seed supply. Claire Hope Cummings, in her new book, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds, discusses the "Doomsday Vault" in more depth, and ties its mission to the struggles to maintain genetic diversity in agriculture despite the increasing privatization of seeds by agribusiness. You can hear Cummings on NPR's OnPoint tomorrow. [UPDATE: Here's the link to the segment.]

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Check out Nancy Polikoff, author of Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage, at the Washington Post, the Washington Blade, the Los Angeles Times, and on her new blog, where Polikoff, an expert on gay and lesbian family law, highlights issues in the news that affect the legal rights of all families.

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Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap, appeared on WUWM's Lake Effect radio show. Listen here.

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Kathryn Joyce, whose book Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, is forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2009, wrote in the Nation about the real motives behind worries that there's a looming European "demographic disaster." The piece was cross-posted at RHRealityCheck, where Kathryn has previously posted about Quiverfull, an anti-birth control movement that urges Christian families to "leave the number of children they have entirely in the hands of God."

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Glenn Branch sent us an update to his post on the evolution debate in Florida (also added as an update to the post):

It happened. On February 29, state senator Ronda Storms (R–Valrico) introduced a bill, SB 2692 [pdf], styled “The Academic Freedom Act.” Purporting to protect the right of teachers to “objectively present scientific information relevant to the full range of scientific views regarding biological and chemical evolution in connection with teaching any prescribed curriculum regarding chemical or biological origins” and the right of students not to be “penalized in any way because he or she subscribes to a particular position or view regarding biological or chemical evolution,” the bill would not affect the content of the standards, although it is clear that it was introduced at the behest at those who opposed their excellent treatment of evolution. A string of similar bills in Alabama—HB 391 and SB 336 in 2004; HB 352, SB 240, and HB 716 in 2005; HB 106 and SB 45 in 2006—failed. With only sixty days in the regular legislative session, perhaps the Florida legislature will be able to find something useful to do, instead of wasting its time mollifying creationists.

Drug-Free School Zone

By Chris Mercogliano

I am in absolute agreement with Bruce E. Levine: it isn’t ODD at all that our society has stepped up its efforts to pathologize young people with biopsychiatric labels like Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD), when they either cannot or will not march in step with the majority culture, and then dose them with the corresponding biopsychiatric drugs.

As Levine reminds us with his deft bit of historical research, America has a long tradition of marginalizing anyone who deviates from established norms—which currently are narrowing at an alarming rate. Or as French philosopher Michel Foucault pointed out in Discipline and Punish, the control of its citizens has always been a primary aim of the state, and what we are witnessing in modern times is the evolution of increasingly subtle ways in which to do so. Today, instead of relying on brute force as was the case in the days of pharaohs and emperors, social institutions like schools, the military, and the mass media subliminally enforce a conformity so pervasive that overt forms of control are no longer necessary. All who resist and refuse to take their places in the social and economic machine, according to Foucault in Madness and Civilization, are labeled with some form of abnormality, and then, as I argue in my book, Teaching the Restless, about the ongoing ADHD hoax, they are medicated with powerful psychotropic drugs that extend society’s control all the way down to the biochemical level.

This business of labeling and drugging kids who won’t sit still, can’t keep up, or don’t fit in became a deep concern of mine in my role as a teacher at the Free School, a noncoercive, democratic, inner-city school for sixty-five students ages two through fourteen in Albany, NY. In the early 1990s there was a sudden spike in the number of students who came to us having been labeled in their previous schools, and so, curious as to why, I embarked on an exhaustive review of the already considerable ADHD literature.

A New Standard in Florida: Evolution is Fundamental

by Glenn Branch

The missing link?

The recent battle over the place of evolution in Florida's state science standards wasn't quite ripped from the pages of a Carl Hiaasen novel—as far as I could tell from my office in California, at any rate, there were no greedy developers, lubricious politicos, or redneck gangsters involved, and no feral ex-governors emerging from the swamp to save the day. But zaniness was abundant among the creationist opponents of the standards, from the fellow who testified that, according to evolution, oranges are "the first cousin to somebody's pet cat," to the student who argued that evolution was unprovable because "no one was around 6,000 years ago." (Then who was it who left a bottle gourd at the Windover site outside Titusville, Florida, about 7,290 years ago?) Ultimately, however, on February 19, 2008, the state board of education voted to accept a new set of state science standards that recognize evolution as a fundamental concept underlying all of biology.

That's quite a change. The previous set of state science standards sedulously avoided even using the e-word, and when the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation conducted its review of state science standards in 2005, it commented, "The superficiality of the treatment of evolutionary biology alone justifies the grade 'F'." But hostility toward evolution education in the Sunshine State is nothing new: after William Jennings Bryan retired to Florida in 1920, he lobbied for legislation prohibiting "the teaching as true of Darwinism or any other evolutionary hypothesis that links man in blood relation with any form of animal life below man." Bryan was only partly successful; in 1923, the legislature passed a resolution that described such teaching as "improper and subversive," but stopped short of prohibiting it altogether. Two years later, the Tennessee legislature passed a law outright banning the teaching of evolution, and the Great Commoner eventually hauled himself from Florida to Dayton, Tennessee, for the trial of John Thomas Scopes.

Note, in Bryan's proposal, the phrase "as true." In a letter to a Florida state senator (quoted in Edward J. Larson's excellent Trial and Error), he explained, "A book which merely mentions [evolution] as a hypothesis can be considered as giving information as to views held, which is very different from teaching it as fact." Bryan died just after the Scopes trial, but his position—that it's okay to teach about evolution, but only as a theory, something conjectural or speculative, and not as a fact—continues to resonate. Creationists who weren't pressing for creationism (whether in the old-fashioned form of creation science or in the new-fangled form of intelligent design) to be added to the Florida state science standards were following Bryan in trying to stigmatize evolution as just a theory. A father in the Panhandle put a Möbian twist on the slogan, saying of his daughters, "I just don't want them to hear a one-sided fact."

Link Roundup: UUs on Street Prophets, Human Guinea Pigs, Teaching Kids About Racism

A link rescue from the not-to-distant past: Carl Elliott, who has a forthcoming Beacon book about consumerism and corruption in the medical industry, had a harrowing piece in the New Yorker about professional human guinea pigs, which is now available on their website.

Most professional guinea pigs are involved in Phase I clinical trials, in which the safety of a potential drug is tested, typically by giving it to healthy subjects and studying any side effects that it produces. (Phase II trials aim at determining dosing requirements and demonstrating therapeutic efficacy; Phase III trials are on a larger scale and usually compare a drug’s results with standard treatments.) The better trial sites offer such amenities as video games, pool tables, and wireless Internet access. If all goes well, a guinea pig can get paid to spend a week watching “The Lord of the Rings” and playing Halo with his friends, in exchange for wearing a hep-lock catheter on one arm and eating institutional food. Nathaniel Miller, a Philadelphia trial veteran who started doing studies to fund his political activism, was once paid fifteen hundred dollars in exchange for three days and two G.I. endoscopies at Temple University, where he was given a private room with a television. “It was like a hotel,” he says, “except that twice they came in and stuck a tube down my nose.”

And one more link rescue, to a story that has timeless importance and made the rounds of AP newspapers a week or so ago: "Ignoring Racist Remarks Is Wrong Lesson For Kids." Many of us have been faced with an uncomfortable situation where someone has made a racially insensitive or offensive comment. Beverley Daniel Tatum, author of Can We Talk About Race, urges parents to broach the issue with the speaker,   but in a way that isn't accusatory or confrontational. The article is a great guide for how to teach children about racism and the importance of honesty, integrity, and diversity.

Over at Street Prophets, this week's Weekly Faith Roundtable is on Unitarian Universalism. Here are a few of the highlights from the discussion:

Lonespark's explanation that she picked the UU church because "I didn't fit into any other boxes."

On the plus side, I love being in a place where my agnostic husband would fit right in if he ever got up that early, where some of my favorite childhood hymns get performed, where all families are valued, where "service is our prayer," and where a dude in my covenant group is very interested in hearing about how I blot to Thor.

A lengthy discussion of where the Seven Principles originated and the possibility of being a "devout UU."

So here's a broader one. We lay claim--lightly--to all of human experience, all science, all scripture, all wisdom traditions as being the heritage of humanity. We draw from those and from individual, personal experience.

So...
    Scripture--check. Our canon is a shade larger and not sealed, however.
    Tradition--check. We see it not as a foundation, but rather as more of a sea anchor.
    Reason--check. Oh yeah. Fiercely. We're coming back around to a wary acceptance of the non-rational, but the irrational is going to be savaged--and that's tradition going back at least to Servetus.
    Experience--check. Very, very much so.

A selection of UU jokes

Great job on the part of Sister Quarterstaff, ogre, lonespark, and bleeding heart, who hosted the discussion.

Dust Off Your Darwin Costume: It's Evolution Weekend!

by Glenn Branch

Not so long ago in Birmingham, England, it was a reggae version of the Origin of Species with a video to match, but soon in San Diego, they’ll be listening to the Galápagos Mountain Boys playing their own brand of scientific bluegrass. In Oslo, Norway, they’ll be attending a series of scholarly lectures on the evolution of language, while they’ll be throwing another shrimp on the barbie by way of celebration in Melbourne, Australia. In Terre Haute, Indiana; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Salem, Oregon, they’ll be sitting down to watch the hilarious documentary Flock of Dodos, but in Philadelphia, they’ll be on their feet to play badminton at the Penn Museum. In Seattle, a Darwin impersonation contest is part of the festivities, while across the Puget Sound in Bremerton, it’s a one-man show with Darwin live and in concert. To top it all, in Whitewater, Wisconsin, the reception is going to feature what’s billed as the world’s largest edible tree of life.

Yes, Darwin Day is back, and still going strong. February 12, 2008, is the 199th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, and colleges and universities, schools, libraries, museums, churches, civic groups, and just plain folks across the country—and the world—are preparing to celebrate Darwin Day, on or around February 12, in honor of the life and work of Charles Darwin. Last year, over 850 such events took place worldwide, and 2008—just one year shy of the Darwin bicentennial—is shaping up to be just as abundant in celebration. Darwin Day provides a marvelous opportunity not only to celebrate Darwin’s birthday but also to enjoy, and engage in, public outreach about science, evolution, and the importance of evolution education. The Darwin Day Celebration website, administered by the Institute of Humanist Studies, maintains a useful registry where you can find a Darwin Day event near you and spread the word about your own.

Manipulating the Metaphors: the Bush Record on Education

by William Ayers

In his State of the Union address on January 28, President Bush, our self-styled “education president,” urged Congress to re-authorize the No Child Left Behind Act, calling it a “good law” and claiming that because of this legislation student learning is improving and “minority students are closing the achievement gap.”  In reality, student learning is not improving under NCLB, and the so-called racial achievement gap is a fraud.  But through a combination of sleight-of-hand, cooking the numbers, and manipulating the metaphors George Bush could make those claims with a smile. 

The education revolution that Bush touts is the result of decades of “school reform” spearheaded by business and powered by ideologues.  “Global competitiveness” is the preoccupation, “accountability” and “standards” the watch-words, and all of it results in a ramped-up obsession with standardized testing and an emphasis on minimal competencies along a narrow band of cognition and skills.  The business metaphor dominates the discourse: inputs in relation to outputs, discipline and punishment, incentives and competitiveness.

It’s worth asking ourselves what makes education in a democracy distinct.  Of course we want children to study hard, to be responsible, to stay away from drugs, and to be prepared for work.  But those are goals we share with totalitarian regimes, monarchies, dictators and kings.  So what is uniquely characteristic of democratic education?

Losing Sleep

by Kelly Bulkeley

Last night the students in my "Psychology of Dreaming" course at John F. Kennedy University turned in their first assignment of the quarter: a personal sleep history from childhood to the present. I like to begin my dream classes with a focus on sleep because it's a great way to jar people into taking a fresh look at the nocturnal dimension of their lives. Most people have never reflected on their sleep patterns or thought about sleep in relation to their life's development and growth over time. When they're encouraged to do so, the results are often startling. As soon as I opened the discussion in class last night, one of the students quickly raised her hand. I called on her, and with no further ado she declared:

"I'm 45 years old, and I just realized I've been sleep deprived for the last 40 years!"

Several other students followed with their own tales of sleepless woe, just like I've found every time I give this assignment in a class and just like I found in the research for American Dreamers. The conclusion is hard to avoid: We are becoming a chronically sleep-deprived nation. Problems with sleep afflict a surprisingly large number of people in contemporary American society, and we don’t really know how widespread these problems are or how they impact people’s long term health and well-being.

Monday Link Roundup: Public Funding for Military Academies, Religious "Tolerance" in Europe

Bill Ayers, founder of the  Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society, is an expert on urban schooling. He also, incidentally, wrote the excellent Teaching Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom (Beacon Press, 2005). His blog is pretty low-traffic, so it's always a great happiness to see him show up in the feed reader. Last week, he posted a piece co-authored with Therese Quinn and Erica Meiners about the increasing militarization of the Chicago school system.

Today, Chicago has the most militarized public school system in the nation, with Cadet Corps for students in middle-school, over 10,000 students participating in JROTC programs, over 1,000 students enrolled in one of the five, soon-to-be six autonomous military high schools, and hundreds more attending one of the nine military high schools that are called “schools within a school.” Chicago now has a Marine Military Academy, a Naval Academy, and three army high schools. When an air force high school opens next year, Chicago will be the only city in the nation to have academies representing all branches of the military. And Chicago is not the only city moving in this direction: the public school systems of other urban centers with largely Black and immigrant low income students , including Philadelphia, Atlanta and Oakland, are being similarly re-formed—and deformed— through partnerships with the Department of the Defense.

Unsurprisingly, these military schools "are located overwhelmingly in low income communities of color, while schools with rich curriculums including magnet schools, regional gifted centers, classical schools, IB programs and college prep schools are placed in whiter, wealthier communities, and in gentrifying areas." Ayers, Quinn, and Meiners are troubled by this and other problems with the academies, including the inherent problems with transforming public civilian education into a military recruiting tool, the fact that military academies promote conformity and discourage individual freedom of thought, and the discrimination practiced by the military via the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell Policy."

Responding to last weekend's New York Times Book Review's Islam Issue, Eboo Patel (Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation, reviewed recently here), addresses the struggle between white Europeans and their Muslim neighbors. Citing Philip Jenkins, Patel draws parallels between the African-American struggle for civil rights and the situation in Europe,  where young Muslims are not offered the same opportunities as their white counterparts. Part of the problem, he says, is that "Europe proudly “tolerates” its minorities, but it continues to view even the second and third generations as foreigners."

Tolerance allows you in and indulges your needs, but treats you like an infant and an outsider. Pluralism respects you and your identity enough to require that you make a contribution to the broader society. One reason for the success of American Muslim immigrants compared to their European co-religionists is America’s instinct towards pluralism.

The Email That Ended a Career: Intelligent Design and Texas Education

by Glenn Branch

I send a lot of e-mail in the course of the average day, and ordinarily nobody is fired as a result. But I’m not always so lucky.

I work at the National Center for Science Education, a non-profit organization that defends the teaching of evolution in the public schools. Even eighty-two years after the Scopes trial, that’s a job that keeps us busy. In a 2005 survey conducted by the National Science Teachers Association, for example, 30% of the science teachers responding indicated that they experienced pressure to omit or downplay evolution and related topics, while 31% indicated that they experienced pressure to include nonscientific alternatives to evolution, such as “creation science” or “intelligent design,” in their science classrooms.

Sometimes the pressure isn’t so quiet, either. In 2004, after efforts to have a creationist textbook adopted were stymied, a creationist majority on the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, passed a policy misleadingly describing evolution as “a theory ... not a fact” and recommending “intelligent design”—the latest incarnation of creationism—as a scientifically credible alternative, and tried to force the science teachers to read a disclaimer to that effect.

Read This! Instilling a Love of Reading in Kids

by Chris Mercogliano

A national study just released by the National Endowment for the Arts warns that the sustainability of American culture is at risk because our society is turning more and more toward electronic media for information and entertainment and we are reading less and less as a result. Big surprise, right? However, as NEA Chairman Dana Gioia comments in the preface to "To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence," we all should be shocked by the magnitude of the decline of reading for pleasure in this country, especially among young people.

Among the study’s more dire findings:

• Only 30% of 13-year-olds read for pleasure on a regular basis.
• The number of 17-year-olds who never read for pleasure increased from 9% in 1984 to 19% in 2004.
• The average American between ages 15 and 24 spends only 7 minutes a day reading and half never read books for pleasure.

There are numerous causes for alarm, says the NEA. To begin with, a strong correlation exists between reading for pleasure and overall reading proficiency. Reading test scores for 9-year-olds—who show no declines in voluntary reading—are at an all-time high, while scores for 17-year-olds began a steady downward trend in 1992. Today, little more than a third of high school seniors read proficiently and even among college graduates reading proficiency is declining at a 20-23% rate.

Book Challenging vs. Challenging Books

by Rick Ayers

An essay on censorship and “book challenging” in schools for Beacon’s new blog would seem a pretty simple piece to write, considering the audience of book lovers and progressives. Narrow-minded right-wingers ban books; thoughtful, well-read people, people who read books published by Beacon Press, want freedom.

Recently, in a class I teach for future high school teachers at the University of San Francisco, a student caused me to think about the complexity of this issue.

Banned Books Week begins tomorrow

Banned Books Week officially begins tomorrow, and Beacon Broadside has already begun our tribute to free speech with Chris Finan's discussion of censorship in America, Helene Atwan's interview with the oft-banned Lois Lowry, and a little nudge in the direction of something we're quite proud of around these parts: a fantastic page devoted to the publication of the Pentagon Papers over at our sister site. The page features a compelling panel discussion from last year's UU General Assembly, and Allison Trzop's Beacon Press and the Pentagon Papers, a master's thesis that's more gripping than that mass-market thriller you've been carrying in your bag.

Banned Books Week has us thinking about censorship and free speech, but the recent controversy over book banning in prisons also got us fired up (along with Chris W. over at Philocrites). Fortunately, the public outcry over this egregious violation of the First Amendment made the government back off for now. It just goes to show that in order to protect speech, you've got to speak up! Of course, there's still more to come on this story, so we'll keep an eye on any future developments.

We have more exciting things on deck for next week, including continued Banned Books Week coverage from Rick Ayers, co-author of Great Books for High School Kids, plus thoughts from Rabbi Arthur Waskow in advance of the Interfaith Fast on October 8. Be sure to add us to your RSS reader, or sign up to receive Beacon Broadside by email.

One Dangerous Author: An Interview with Lois Lowry

In honor of banned book week, Beacon director Helene Atwan checked in with one of America's most beloved (and sometimes banned) authors, Lois Lowry. Lois and Helene became friends while serving together on the board of PEN New England, a branch of PEN, the oldest human rights organization in the world. PEN has been fighting for free speech and the rights of readers and writers for decades. If you're a Poet, Essayist, Editor, Novelist, Bookseller, Librarian, or passionate reader and you haven’t been to any of the PEN programs, you will definitely want to jump to those web sites as soon as you’ve finished reading today's Beacon Broadside.

Lowry is the acclaimed author of books for children, young adults, and readers of all ages, including the Anastasia Krupnik and Gooney Birds series. She is also the author of The Giver, which has sold over 5 million copies, won the American Library Association's Newbery Medal, and is currently being made into a motion picture by Warner Brothers. The Giver won another, more dubious honor from the ALA when it made its list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-1999, and the book continues to draw challenges around the country.