Arts Education: Not Everything We Value Needs to Be “Compulsory"

by Emily Paige Ballou

Emily Paige Ballou is an AEA stage manager based in NYC, and co-editor of the book Sincerely, Your Autistic Child: What People on the Autism Spectrum Wish Their Parents Knew about Growing Up, Acceptance, and Identity from Beacon Press.

In his column entitled “If Math and Science are Required in School, the Arts Should Be Too,” Anthony Piccione argues just that: that if we regard engagement with the arts as just as important to a child’s education as a working knowledge of math or science, arts education should be required in schools just as those classes are.

But I was left unsure about precisely what requirements or policies Mr. Piccione is advocating for or how they would be implemented. Are we talking about state governments mandating funding and support for arts instruction in schools? Are we talking about ensuring enough arts programming in schools to ensure that every student is meaningfully introduced to the arts in class and that those who wish to pursue them to higher levels are able to? Or are we talking about something else? Does he mean that arts education to a particular level should be required by schools of individual students, the same way that math and science are? I think the difference matters.

I believe deeply in the importance of arts education, which indeed proved transformative to my own life. And I share many of Mr. Piccione’s concerns about artistic and cultural literacy and the future of our artistic professions. But I have serious misgivings about seeking to demonstrate the importance of something by making it “compulsory,” which I believe evinces a lack of respect for the autonomy and thoughtfulness of our students, and further, in my experience, is almost never what tends to convince them of a subject’s value to their lives, rather than making them cynical and resentful about it.

Piccione asks whether, because he personally wasn’t talented at math as a child, education in math shouldn’t have been compulsory for him. And while I’m not an educator, I actually do suspect that the ways in which we currently teach math are incredibly counterproductive to a large proportion of students, and that seriously reconsidering how much math should be “compulsory” for most students may be among the possible solutions.

And in the second place? The arts are not like math.

Participating in the arts requires personal investment in a way that the study of no other academic subject really does, and I think fostering a healthy relationship to that endeavor requires that we apply an absolute minimum amount of coercion to it. Part of what made theater so valuable to me when I was a teenager was that for once, it was something I was choosing to do because I wanted it. For once, it was something I wasn’t being coerced into or that someone else had decided was for my own good. If my participation had been made “compulsory,” my resulting relationship with the performing arts would be very different—and nowhere near as good.

Or let’s look at the real-world impact of compulsory P.E. Do we have a nation of physically fit adults with healthy relationships to our bodies, exercise, and nutrition?

No, I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in seeing the arts treated the way we treat P.E., science, or math. I don’t even think we should be treating those subjects the way we treat them now.

In fact, an article in Crain’s New York Business just this week on high school students at risk of being lost by the school system due to the pandemic notes the observations of one teacher this way: “[S]tudents don’t always go to school for English or math. They arrive for the things that light them up: to write songs and choreograph dance moves for a student-run concert, to win at a mock trial, to go to prom, to participate in a school play, to prepare for a classroom party or to try out for the football team.”

These are not the things students are being forced into studying. The reasons that some of the most vulnerable students are showing up to school are for the creative opportunities that their schools provide them without coercion. Framing the arts as a subject that needs to be made “compulsory,” on the other hand, seems like an excellent way to rob the joy and appreciation of them from a lot of students who might otherwise become passionate about them.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t have any mandatory academic instruction, but I see little evidence that students need to be compelled to study the arts or participate in them. They want to.

Nor am I convinced by the argument that the future of the professional theater is meaningfully in danger from lack of compulsory arts education. How often do we already talk about the numbers of theater artists coming out of BFA and MFA programs for whom there aren’t enough jobs as it is? As far as pure numbers, we are not hurting for students who are interested in pursuing the performing arts as a career. I am much, much more concerned with how we can better ensure that marginalized and underserved students have the same access and opportunities to pursue the arts, either as profession or avocation, as students in whiter, more affluent school systems already do. I hear much more often from young adults interested in pursuing a career in the arts but unsure of the financial viability of doing so.

And if you follow social media debates about bootlegging of Broadway shows very much at all, it’s clear to me, at least, that teenagers and young adults across the country are actually desperate for more affordable access to theater as potential audience members. They don’t need to be lectured to about why they should care. They do.

I think that if we concern ourselves with access to the arts, we are not going to have to force anyone’s participation in order to stay relevant as a profession.

If, on the other hand, we’re talking about ensuring public support and financing for the presence of arts in schools, then I think we’re having a much different and more valuable conversation. Are we, instead of introducing even more coercion into students’ lives, talking about public investment in arts education, ensuring access and opportunity for the students who stand to benefit the most? About the clear benefits to both academic achievement and emotional health of ability to participate in the arts?

Are we ensuring that caring, passionate teachers can stay in the profession rather than burning out from low pay and inhuman job performance expectations, and have the freedom and classroom time to devote to discussion of the arts in their curriculum? What if instead of framing the importance of arts education as one more thing we need to control about students’ lives, we made sure that every school library has a Broadway HD subscription? Made sure every student gets a chance to attend a regional theater or a modern dance production and talk openly about their experience of what they saw? Scaled back the number of hours kids have to spend on homework so they have time and energy to practice music, art, or theater if that’s what they want?

If that’s what we’re talking about, then I’m on board. But if we’re talking about a conception of arts education as just another thing we need to require of students’ already over-regimented lives? Sorry, but no.

The crisis of arts education in our schools simply is not that not enough students are being forced into it. It’s that their access to it is under attack. I’ve made the performing arts my livelihood and I care as much about their future as anyone. But I worry very much when it seems the only vocabulary we have for how much we value something and want others to value it, too, is that it needs to be made “compulsory.” And I worry what we’d be teaching students about the arts if we were to approach them that way.