Education Week - October 4, 2017 - 23

edweek.org/go/commentary

It is telling that math educators are generally not
seeking to have their subject taught in arts classes."

COMMENTARY
Q&A: We Can't Give Up on Public Schools
Public education is in danger of losing its democratic
values, but its shortcomings don't warrant giving up on the
institution altogether,
argue educators
Deborah Meier and
Emily Gasoi in their
recently released
Getty
book These School
Belong to You and Me: Why We Can't Afford to Abandon Our
Public Schools. In a Q&A, the authors share their ideas for
improving public education for all students.

www.edweek.org/go/meier-gasoi-qa

Censorship in the Schoolhouse

Raul Arias for Education Week

Arts Integration
Is a Sucker's Game

By Jay P. Greene
rts advocates are earnest in their support of arts integration through science, technology, engineering, art, and
math instruction. But as a strategy for
promoting arts education, STEAM is
almost certainly counterproductive as
well as pedagogically unsound.
Instead, the best way to ensure that
students are exposed to the arts is to set aside regular
times in the school day for arts education to be taught
by designated arts teachers in separate arts classrooms.
If arts instruction is integrated into science, math, and
other subjects, schools will be tempted to curtail separate
arts classes and staff. School leaders could claim that the
arts are being covered at other times, in other places, and
by other staff, so there is less need to set aside specific
time for the arts. By trying to put the arts almost everywhere, integration is likely to result in arts education almost nowhere.
Pursuing arts integration would be like most new-age
religions: initially attractive but quickly forgotten without the regular reinforcement provided by ritual and
sacred spaces. Most religious movements have learned
that the best way to encourage people to contemplate
the divine is to designate special places and times for
worship. We might say that people should integrate religion into all aspects of their lives at all times, but
the reality is that most people have a hard time doing
so without reserving a time, place, and leadership for
religious practice.
If you find the religious analogy unpersuasive, consider this thought experiment: Imagine that educators
suggested teaching math by integrating it into the rest
of the curricula. Do you think math education advocates
would believe humanities teachers could cover the topic
just fine? It is telling that math educators are generally
not seeking to have their subject taught in arts classes.
Of course, some educators seem to think that all subjects should be integrated into all others. Why stop at
STEAM? Why not add history to make it SHTEAM or
add physical education to make it PHSTEAM?
The problem with this approach is that academic disciplines help organize and convey knowledge more effec-

tively. It is pedagogically unsound to integrate all disciplines, especially when teaching young children, because
it demands that students combine knowledge they do not
yet possess. Students cannot gain new insights from the
connections between geometry and the arts until they
first have some mastery of those subjects. We cannot expect students to run before they can walk.
This type of interdisciplinary instruction also places
too many demands on teachers, who would need expert
knowledge in multiple fields as well as command of effective techniques for integrating them. There are exceptional teachers who can pull off true interdisciplinary
instruction, but those cases are rare.
Most arts advocates are trying to turn STEM into
STEAM not because they find interdisciplinary instruction so attractive, but because they recognize that the
arts are being squeezed out of the curriculum and hope
to protect them by joining other, more "popular" subjects.
Like the plot of a teen movie, the bullied kid hopes to find
protection by joining the cool group. That story is unlikely
to turn out any better for the arts than it does in those
films. The only way for the arts to ensure their place in
the curricula is for advocates of the arts to stand up for
themselves and argue for why the arts are important on
their own.
Arts advocates have made this mistake before, trying
to demonstrate arts education's value by claiming that
it increases performance in math and reading. Unfortunately, as researchers Ellen Winner, Thalia R. Goldstein,
and Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin documented in a 2013 report for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development, there is little evidence that arts instruction improves outcomes in math or reading. Some arts
advocates saw priority being given to math and reading,
so they hoped they could borrow some of that protection
by claiming that the arts contributed to those subjects.
By failing to emphasize the demonstrable benefits of arts
education for those subjects, the strategy undermined the
arts' case for integration.
Arts advocates need to make the positive case for what
arts education teaches, not hide behind the skirts of math
and science. The arts teach particular ways of thinking
about and viewing the world. The arts teach some vocationally useful skills. And most importantly, the arts connect us to our cultural heritage and teach us how to be
civilized human beings. Education is not entirely about
the pragmatic, but should also convey the beautiful and
profound-something the arts do well. That is why arts
education should be preserved in its own right. n
JAY P. GREENE is a professor and head of the department of education
reform at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, where he directs
the university's National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab.

The recent Banned Books Week brought an annual reminder
of censorship issues in schools to national attention. In
online-only essays, two English professors weighed in on the
discussion. In a Commentary, Jonna Perrillo urges teachers
to consider not only which books they teach, but how they
teach them. Christina
Berchini writes in a
First Person essay
for Education Week
Teacher that limiting
Getty
selections to "age
appropriate" subject
matter risks invalidating students' real-life experiences.

www.edweek.org/go/perrillo
www.edweek.org/go/berchini

WEB COMMENT

The word 'responsible' seems
to be missing from much of
our current thinking, unless it
is applied to someone else.
Schools cannot educate most
kids whose parents are not
participants."
-Charles Hoff,
responding to Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj's Commentary,
"Dear Secretary Betsy DeVos, Don't Overlook Parents"

www.edweek.org/go/sattin-bajaj

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Education Week - October 4, 2017

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