By Kayla Smernoff
Howard University News Service
Snowy Sabel, an art and psychology student at the University of Michigan, credits drawing for helping to expand her view of beauty and the world.
“I do think art is connected to empathy,” said Sabel, an artist since her youth. “It can be a very emotionally explorative process and can help people connect to themselves and others in new ways.”
“Drawing people especially can allow you to appreciate beauty in a way you may not otherwise consider,” she added.
Art can influence and educate people, but the importance of arts education is often at odds with the allocations of school funding, which could intensify under President-elect Donald Trump.
“I noticed in some of my high school art classes that there were limited materials and seemed to be less funding than in other elective classes like robotics, for example,” said Sabel, who grew up in California.
For many years, other students and teachers have also noticed that their arts funding has been diminished in favor of science-based endeavors. These changes have raised some concern about the future of arts education and how a lack of art could affect America.
Funding for arts programs in public schools has wavered for more than a decade. Arts and entertainment management researchers Chris Ramos and Dan Baugher at Pace University, presented their findings on how the 2008 recession affected “the impact on funding and perceptions of the value of arts education” in New York schools at the annual conference of the American Society of Business and Behavioral Sciences in 2013.
Ramos and Baugher found that art was not a funding priority, because other subjects could quantify how well students were performing. However, the researchers found a way to quantify the subject’s impact with statistics.
“Arts management continued to have a low priority relative to mathematics and language,” Ramos and Baugher wrote. “In part, this appeared to be due to the latter having stringent testing requirements, which significantly affected evaluations for the schools and their administrators.”
The public school system, already struggling with funding because of the nation’s economic downturn, was forced to cut art programs in favor of science, technology, engineering and math or STEM programs.
Embed from Getty ImagesCutting arts funding is not a new phenomenon. In the 1980s and 1990s, the National Endowment for the Arts experienced legal issues and budget cuts, because of the art the agency funded.
“I am deeply offended by some of the filth that I see into which federal money has gone,” said president George H.W. Bush in 1990. “Blasphemous material has no business getting one cent of the taxpayers’ money.”
Congruently, conversation about education reform stirred among America’s academics. “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform,” a 1983 report from the U.S. National Commission on Excellence in Education, sounded an alarm about how students were falling behind.
Some, such as Edward J. Kormondy, vice president for academic affairs at California State University in Los Angeles at the time, thought that the “rising tide of mediocrity” was “particularly relevant to mathematics and science.”
In the 2000s and 2010s, America’s national leadership was similarly enthusiastic about STEM education. Coming out of the recession, Americans raised concerns about being behind in the industries that some consider “the future.”
“Our lead will erode if we don’t make some good choices now,” former President Barack Obama said in an interview with Vox’s technology branch, Re/code. “STEM education is a huge priority. We have to have our kids in math and science, and it can’t just be a handful of kids. It’s gotta be everybody.”
Technology billionaire and Trump campaign contributor Elon Musk recently opened a school that mimics the post-recession emphasis on science education in its curriculum. Astra Nova, the self-described “laboratory school,” was born from the rocket design and manufacturing company SpaceX’s Synthesis School. It is an online learning space that boasts artificial intelligence tutors that are “infinitely patient, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful” for Astra Nova students.
Musk has also confirmed his involvement in Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, an oversight body that exists outside the official realm of the U.S. government.
In October 2023, Trump told the public via social media he planned to get rid of the Department of Education as a central body. Instead, he would leave it up to individual states to decide how they want to educate their youth.
“One other thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., and sending all education and education work and needs back to the states,” Trump said.
“The arts can also provide an opportunity for students to make connections to other aspects of their learning, for example, social studies, math, science, et cetera, through art history and techniques.”
Brigid Horgan, an artist and art teacher
The path forward in the arts education sphere uncertain with standardized testing-based funding and the priorities of Trump and Musk. Daniel Bowen and Brian Kisida, researchers at Texas A&M University’s College of Education & Human Development, identified the benefits of arts education in a controlled setting.
“We find that randomly assigning arts educational opportunities reduces disciplinary infractions, improves writing achievement and increases students’ emotional empathy,” the researchers said in their study, published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management in November 2022.
In the past, measurements of art education tended to be qualitative, as opposed to the easily quantifiable math and science data captured by standardized testing. Bowen and Kisida’s research shows data for ideas that many arts teachers have understood for a long time. One consensus is that arts education is essential for children to understand the world around them, especially when it is increasingly partisan.
In the class of Brigid Horgan, an artist and art teacher who recently received a masters in art education, fourth to eighth grade art students are educated about everything from art history to graphic design to visual art.
“I believe it is important that students make connections to other cultures and time periods in art, and potentially find similarities between themselves and other artists,” said Horgan who has begun to diversify her curriculum with female artists and artists of color.
For teachers like Horgan, art education is not at odds with science, technology, engineering or math. This growing recognition is fueling the integration of arts with STEM, known as STEAM. Horgan’s lessons help students supplement what they may be learning in other classes.
“The arts can also provide an opportunity for students to make connections to other aspects of their learning, for example, social studies, math, science, et cetera, through art history and techniques,” Horgan said. “When students learn how to compliment and encourage their peers’ artistic development, they are practicing empathy.”
Sabel echoed a similar sentiment to Horgan. Students, or any participant in an art program, have more to gain than they have to lose from engaging with their own and others’ creativity.
“It would benefit everyone to at least try some form of art at some point in their life,” Sabel said. “Trying art in some capacity can help people use their brain in new ways and form different perspectives.”
Kayla Smernoff is a reporter and designer for HUNewsService.com.
