Arts are another excuse for dumbing down our youth. Look how many kiddies today are pursuing music and art degrees rather than science and math.
Art should be an elective and only one course per semester.
Unfortunately, there’s too much intellectual falseness going on in art these days. However, cutting off the spigot of talented artists in training isn’t going to improve the U.S. economy one whit.
I am old enough that there were no arts courses in my high school except one/semester. I was allowed to take it. My husband, who also went to school when there was only a single course available, was not allowed by his family to take it, as it was considered superfluous.
My parents told me they would not pay for an art education. I qualified in my sophmore year for the College of Art at the University of Illinois on portfolio review. My parents insisted I take art education courses, as well.
Finally, after taking time off to work, get married and have a child, I went back to school on my own. My advisor told me in 1966 that I would hate being buried in the education system, where art was not funded and that, based on my work and my history, I was one of the 5% of all art students who could make it as a career. He was right and today I make my living hand manufacturing a fiber item I developed and have been marketing for 22 years.
My husband dropped out of college and while working in a factory, learned to silver solder. In college, he had not been able to take professional art courses because it was not his declared major. Non-major courses had no real critique and did not take the students seriously. On his own, he became an accomplished silversmith and went on to pioneer techniques in reactive metals and to do some wonderful work in forged iron. He did this work successfully for 20 years.
The only reason he is not working as an artist/craftsman today is that the passage of the AMT killed the tax rule that allowed most galleries to exist. These were run by the wives of high earners who used the losses as a tax write-off. Prior to the entire rolling of Bush I by the donk Congress, we were making a nice middle class income off jewlery production and marketing. Combined with a fashion sea change when Clinton took office and an increase in the cost of marketing, much of the Second American Craft Movement disappeared in the early to mid 1990s.
We still enjoy galleries and craft fairs and the quality of most of the work is not as innovative as it was in the seventies through the nineties. Even with loads of art and craft education, including entire curricula devoted to production crafts as a business, most of the accomplished work seems to be by older people who did not have all this access and encouragement.
I strongly believe that art in innate. Technique can be taught, of course, but the sheer will to produce is in some of us from birth and will be expressed even if if it is forbidden. I am not convinced the opposite is true.
This is also an entreprenuerial professional business. While a few colleges have some business courses tacked on to the production crafts curriculum, it has little relationship to the realities of limited production hand manufacturing or the marketing system as it presently exists in galleries and trade shows. To be successful takes a combination of business and marketing savvy along with creativity, technical accomplishment and the ability to source materials, devise production systems and meet production deadlines consistently and profitably. An MBA once told me that someone with his degree could run any business, but that did not mean they could start one.
I do not see that the prevalence of art instruction has produced more work or better work. I wonder if even 5% still graduate to become working professionals. I think it is more like 2% today.
Want to become another barbarian nation like Iran or China? There’s one way to do it. Our next generation of professional conductors, opera singers, and instrumentalists for orchestras won’t be coming out of high school ready to step into the pit, and a single class a semester isn’t remotely enough to train up future professionals.
I considered going to college as a music major (flute - performance) but realized I wasn’t remotely the caliber musician to do so, nor was I willing to put in the sort of work to become one. Add that on to the fact I was too painfully shy to consider anything where I might actually be heard (a jazz band or soloist rather than an orchestra)...
Our priest has a doctorate in music. His wife is completing hers.
We have an excellent music program, among other things.