Applause for Applause

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Teach Your Children Well

by Lawrence Salberg (Co-founder)

For about a three-year period in the late nineties I used to watch, along with all of the other pseudo-nouveau Gordon Gekko’s, CNBC in order to stay on top of my ever-expanding portfolio. Alas, it is no longer necessary for me to tune in as frequently. I remember from those heady illusory days as a hotshot Wall Street player that whenever one of the talking heads would mention General Electric they would always disclose that G.E. was the parent company of CNBC. They did this, I assume, for legal reasons and also to maintain the appearance of journalistic objectivity and integrity. In that same spirit I want to disclose that I own and operate a performing arts school for children called Applause...For Kids. I tell you that because this column is about the need for performing arts education in the curriculum of all students starting in elementary and going through high school; and if it appears that I am being self-serving by writing about this, I want you to know that I know it. Let me begin by stating the obvious. Our public schools are in a critical state of disarray. They are staffed by overworked, underpaid teachers and administrators whose success as educators is measured by how well their students do on a series of state mandated standardized tests. For the most part, these are committed, conscientious, idealistic people who are shackled by a system that stifles creativity and pillories those who take the initiative to introduce ideas that are outside the state approved curriculum. A bureaucracy that is rife with personal agendas and political ambitions that make it nearly impossible to fulfill the stated purpose of the system, to teach our children, perpetuate this system. Who’s to blame? We all are. Parents, teachers, administrators, politicians are all at various times equally responsible for the morass that is our educational system. What do we do about it? Short of an all out Operation Iraqi Freedom type assault designed to completely eliminate the old regime, I don’t know. What does any of this have to do with arts education? In the United States the arts, both visual and performing have always been an afterthought. And not just in our schools. The National Endowment for the Arts has had its budget nearly obliterated over the past ten years. Local arts councils around the nation have seen both state support and private donations nearly dry up over the course of this most recent economic downturn. In public schools, any time there is a need for cut backs, the first area to be downsized, if there is any available to begin with, is the arts. Our society does not see the need for or value of the arts or arts education. I have seen over the course of the past year that I have spent teaching kids both in the public schools and in my studio the essential nature of this type of education. And not just for those kids who have been ‘bitten’ by the stage bug, or who are different in that ethereal artsy way, or are not athletically inclined, but for all of them. Beginning in kindergarten, to show kids how to use their voices and bodies to express what they feel and think is a cornerstone in developing self-confidence and esteem. Introducing them to improvisational theater games and story telling will quantitatively improve their ability to think critically and write creatively. Allowing them to hear and speak the language and ideas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare and others as an integrated part of their curriculum will make studying these great writers far less daunting when faced with them in the future. Incorporating in a participatory way the vision of Van Gogh, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Picasso will stimulate in them compassion, kindness, empathy and appreciation for what is beautiful in a fairly ugly world. I have seen children who are bruised and beaten, shut down and shut off find their voices in a very short period of time when they have been exposed to these kinds of lessons. This is not a panacea for what ails our public schools. Nor are these ideas fully developed in my own mind, but I am fully convinced that if someone with vision and courage would try implementing these notions into their curriculum and tracking the development of the students over a number of years the results would be astounding. In this broken educational system we are confronted with I haven’t seen too many viable plans to fix it proposed. This is one small idea to begin the massive renovation that is required.