Arts Education Online Conversation

National Conversation on Arts Education

The Arts Education Partnership (AEP) is offering a one-week virtual conversation on arts education in the United States, Monday, December 1-Friday, December 5, 2008. Join leaders in the arts and education for a discussion on the state of arts education. This virtual conversation will be held with 15 leaders in arts and education on ArtsJournal.com (http://www.artsjournal.com/artsed ).

From a recent announcement:

Participants include: Participants include: Sam Hope, executive director, The National Office for Arts Accreditation (NOAA); Jack Lew, Global University Relations Manager for Art Talent at EA; Laura Zakaras, RAND; James Cuno, Director, Art Institute of Chicago; Richard Kessler, Executive Director, Center for Arts Education; Eric Booth, Actor; Midori, Violinist; Bau Graves, Executive director, Old Town School of Folk Music; Kiff Gallagher, Music Nation Service Initiative Founder; Bennett Reimer, Founder of the Center for the Study of Education and the Musical Experience, author of A Philosophy of Music Education; Edward Pauly, the director of research and evaluation at the Wallace Foundation; Moy Eng, Program Director of the Performing Arts Program at The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; John Rockwell, critic; and Susan Sclafani, Managing Director, Chartwell Education Group. A video by director Peter Sellars will also be featured.

The topic will be:

A Debate on Arts Education
Will our culture suffer if we don’t do more to teach the arts?
December 1-5, 2008
For decades, as teaching of the arts has been cut back in our public schools, alarms have been raised about the dire consequences for American culture. Artists and arts organizations stepped in to try to take up some of the slack. Foundations funded programs to take art into the schools. But producers of art aren't primarily in the education business. Schools increasingly focused on meeting basic skills benchmarks have less and less time to make room for study of the arts. And technology has spawned a vast, crowded, and alluring marketplace of creativity competing for attention. New research sponsored by the Wallace Foundation suggests that a generation of Americans has not developed the knowledge or skills to engage with our cultural heritage. Without that engagement, the arts as we know them are unsustainable over the long run. Can anything be done?