Professor Media*

From the broadsheets and banned theater of America’s founding era to TV news, Twitter, and sitcoms today, media have been our professors, teaching us about our world and shaping how we think about and respond to important issues. Mass media are more directly educative for most adults than any type of formal schooling. Increasingly, as the current mania for standardized testing narrows the school curriculum, media also are surpassing classroom teachers as our children’s most influential educators.

This media-education interconnection is complex and often problematic. While media have helped to shape progress on some issues of importance to American democracy, they also have contributed to ignorance and misunderstanding. The First Amendment protects freedom of expression, but it does not ensure truth. Societally reflective sitcoms, for example, have paved the way for progress on social issues, from civil rights to marriage equality. But biased political advertising and propagandistic “news” have contributed to political stagnation and the growing gap between rich and poor.

Media are seductive. We spend hours on “screen time.” Those who control the media well understand that what is portrayed and how it is framed shapes socially shared knowledge. The rise of corporate oligarchy in the United States has been achieved, in part, through concerted propaganda passed off as truth. What this means is that, if we are to reclaim American democracy, greater attention needs to be paid to the educative power of media—and not merely to the traditional forms (movies, radio, television) but to new media that we carry with us in our mobile phones and tablet computers. According to a Pew study last year, one in three Americans gets news through Facebook.** And two-thirds of adult Americans use Facebook.

For media consumers—which means everyone, children and adults—it has never been more important to exercise effective credibility strategies, such as critically examining claims of “truth.” A quote attributed to American economist Thomas Sowell is apt: “If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.” However, such understanding must be taught, not just in schools but through the media themselves.

Principles of journalism must cross all platforms, from sitcoms to news reports. Are “facts” accurate, credible, verifiable, contextually appropriate, and unbiased? Whether the purveyor is a talking head or a comic character, how is “truth” situated? If we subscribe to the biblical admonition that the “truth will set you free,” then we also must invoke the first part of that quotation about “knowing the truth,” which is the real challenge, regardless of the context.

*This essay is cross-posted on two blogs: Advancing Learning and Democracy (http://advancinglearning.blogspot.com) and Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com).

** http://www.journalism.org/2013/10/24/the-role-of-news-on-facebook/

Dance Education for All

Lately, because of some recent discussions with the board of our local Windfall Dancers school and company here in Bloomington, Indiana, I’ve been thinking about the nature of dance education and, to be frank, its general absence from the public school curriculum. Dedicated dance classes are a rarity, and dance departments are virtually unheard of (though, of course, there are exceptions).

One reason for the absence of dance in the curriculum is lack of recognition that dance is a kinesthetic art form from which all students would derive benefit. In most schools, if dance is touched on at all, it is in the context of physical education. The physicality of dance gets it lumped in with dodge-ball and track. Indeed, acrobatics have long been a part of the dance repertoire. Take a look at the Nicolas brothers, Donald O’Connor, or contestants on the popular television show, “So You Think You Can Dance.”

But dancing and dance education are about more than physicality. Poet John Dryden called dancing “the poetry of the foot.” To Martha Graham, dance was “the hidden language of the soul.”

Isadora Duncan summed up the art this way: “There are likewise three kinds of dancers: first, those who consider dancing as a sort of gymnastic drill, made up of impersonal and graceful arabesques; second, those who, by concentrating their minds, lead the body into the rhythm of a desired emotion, expressing a remembered feeling or experience. And finally, there are those who convert the body into a luminous fluidity, surrendering it to the inspiration of the soul.”

Thus it always has been difficult to situate dance in the school curriculum, and this difficulty often has relegated dance education to the fringe — and add-on rather than a core subject for all students.

Merce Cunningham, the renowned dancer and choreographer who died at age 90 in April this year, spent much of his life as a teacher of dance and as a strong advocate for dance education. But he also recognized the challenges not only of dancing but also of teaching others to dance. Dancing is movement, and movement by its nature is ephemeral. Cunningham put it this way: “You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls.”

And so the challenge for educators who believe, as I do, that the arts — all of the arts — are fundamental to our development as holistic beings, is somehow to capture the ephemeral that is so much the reality of dance and situate it in the core of schooling. Dance should not be merely an add-on, an occasional lesson in P.E. class, an after-school activity, or something a few students do in the context of other activities, from glee club to show choir. Dance is something that all students need to experience.

A Philosophical Grounding

From time to time education philosophy cycles from the instrumental to the holistic and back again, particularly in terms of public policy. To be clear at the outset, I believe the holistic is of greater value, and I suspect that most educators also believe this.

Some years ago I approached John Goodlad about bringing out a second edition of his 1979 book, What Schools Are For, because the essential discussion is so sound. He consented, and I acquired his old mentor Ralph Tyler’s last piece of writing (before his death at age 92) to serve as a foreword. In this book Goodlad hearkens to the precepts articulated by John Dewey and others early in the twentieth century, namely, that the central purpose of education is individual self-realization. Along this journey there are, of course, instrumental purposes, such as learning to read, to compute, and to work with others.

Dewey averred that “the criterion of the value of school education is the extent to which it creates a desire for continued growth and supplies the means for making the desire effective in fact.” Almost sixty years later, Lawrence Cremin paraphrased Dewey, saying that “the aim of education is not merely to make citizens, or workers, or fathers, or mothers, but ultimately to make human beings who will live life to the fullest.”

Whenever education is narrowly prescribed, it loses value. Goodlad refers to “educational bankruptcy” in schools “when certain groups take literally and seriously the notion that the primary goal of schools is to teach the three Rs.” Effective schooling is much, much more. I embrace Goodlad’s notion of the “educative society — one in which the whole culture educates.” And, for me, that culture cannot be defined by one geopolitical designation but must be international. At the core of all education should, indeed must, be the arts writ large.