Literacy, Numeracy. . .and Humanity

Toward An Arts Approach to Academic Instruction

The other night, we watched one of those television ads for tutoring services. This one was pitched to parents who fear their children will lose their academic edge over the summer. I found myself getting annoyed with the ad, and it came to me: people do not retain all the information they learn. That is, nobody can hold in memory, for immediate access, all the facts s/he learns. Aside from being an impossibility, it would drive us insane to have that much information floating around in our brains. (This is not to diss the Shannon Wolkins’s of our time, who seem to remember everything.)

Instead, good learners, no matter what their age, have great skills at accessing what they need. Good mathemeticians surely do not remember all the formulas they need, but they know in an instant how to find them, and good writers almost always use a thesaurus. Although we teachers nearly have heart attacks finding strategies to help kids retain everything, it just isn’t humanly possible.

I attended an arts retreat last week. Each school district in the state has a representative called a “District Arts Coordinator,” and we all get together in a woodsy resort and share ideas to promote arts instruction in our districts. One person said, talking about No Child Left Behind, that because of the terrific stress that schools feel about getting funding based on test scores, a la NCLB, that much elementary instruction boils down to Literacy and Numeracy. However, that leaves out the most important thing, becoming human, becoming a responsive human being, thus the adaptation, “Literacy, Numeracy, and Humanity.”

The arts make us human. They teach us how to respond in compassion and kindness. They teach us to synthesize information and use it in new ways. They make us whole. Our retreat discussion often revolved around developing arts strategies to teach core subjects, which can free teachers to meet literacy and numeracy instructional requirements (many schools require a certain amount of hours spent on each in elementary classrooms. . . .lots of hours) with arts strategies.

Call it integration, call it cross-curricular instruction, call it what you will, but it is a splendid idea. Aside from the fact that using arts strategies to teach the academic core often results in stronger test scores, it has the transcendent result of making kids happy. This has to count for something important.

Many school district, faced with low test scores and possible censure, including the loss of funding, from NCLB, have turned to tutoring. However, a June 13, 2008 report in The Washington Post reveals that tutoring has not helped raise test scores (Studies: Tutoring has negligible effect on scores at struggling schools).

We have yet to see definitive studies on the effects of arts integration and test scores, but some people are working on data now. But perhaps it is beside the point. The arts, in themselves, are what make us human. They are worth being at center stage whether they help test scores or not. When our children graduate from high school, they will become many things. In my community, many of them will become coal miners and ranchers. How much better is it that they become coal miners who read literature, ranchers who play the trumpet, housewives who love the symphony? There are many such people in my community, and I have to say that their lives are rich and interesting.

We can only hope that the strictures of NCLB will be loosened someday (soon, hopefully), either by strongly rewriting the law or –we wish– getting rid of it altogether. In the meantime, we can chant this mantra, “Literacy, Numeracy, Humanity,” and then do something to make it so, not only with arts integration in the content areas, but also with a rich arts program for its own sake.