Art? who needs it?

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In my career I taught in five different school districts on both coasts and in the middle.

Regardless of location, demographics, or real needs, when cuts to the budget had to be made, the first to get cut were the arts.  Sports simply were never touched.

Now they may have come up with creative ways to justify this, but when statistics show that more kids who are involved in some aspect of the arts in high school have a far greater chance of careers in areas related to the arts, while the overwhelming number of those who played sports will not have careers that are even loosely connected to sports, their budget decisions need to be examined..

And if you think the reason is that there is a societal preference to sports because they are manly while the arts are for, well, the “creative” kids, you are correct.

If you look at the history of schools in the U.S. you can see that in the past the vast majority of those who left the classroom for an office were the coaches and avid sports fans.

One year, after twelve of advocating for students, advocacy that called for attending many late night meetings, a court case, defending myself in the court of public opinion (and doing well with that), and just needing to pull back a bit, I was verbally reprimanded by a principal because he had not seen me at any football games.  I hadn’t attended a school play, a chorus or band performance during that same time, but that as not an issue. Not being there for sports was.

School meant sports to them, and that is all that counted.

The second round of cuts, if needed, would be the girls’ sports for pretty much the same reason. But they seemed to never get to the third phase that would have hit the boys.

Small minded attached something negative to the arts, and so they were undesirable.

The claim was that sports were necessary because they taught character, but memories of your high school jocks often reveal that character building was less important than a trophy.
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Art taught critical thinking and personal growth, and those who wanted their actions to go unanalyzed certainly were not in favor of that.

And now this prejudice to the arts has reached the White House.

The National Endowment for the Arts has fallen victim to Mr. Man, Donald Trump and his GOP Congress.

The United States is going to be the only country in the world without government support for the arts.

The major problem with the National Endowment for the Arts is that it allowed for works of art that made people think.

It created arts councils in every state, and even generated important new fields, such as art therapy for war victims. It helped revitalize cities that needed that, and even got private funders to support artists and the arts so it was a cost effective investment.

But Trump promised to bring runaway federal spending under control, and bring down the national debt. To do this he will eliminate the NEA and public television for a savings that amounts to all 0.02% of the $3.8 trillion federal budget.

The NEA’s whole annual budget cost about the same as one fighter jet, and Trump wants to buy a whole bunch more of those because we certainly need  lot more of those to add to the many surplus ones we haven’t used.

What we don’t need is art or beauty.

We just need compensating weapons

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