“Education is not preparation for life; it is life itself.”

 

– JOHN DEWEY

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Even before the recent school budget cuts, the recommended spend per child on arts education was only 44 cents per day, and middle school students were only expected to spend about 1% of their time in school receiving arts instruction.

 

Less than 1/3 actually did.

 

It is clear that decades of advocacy touting the ability of arts education to improve test scores, to support mental health, and to prepare the next generation for the growing creative workforce, have failed to move the needle.

 

It’s time we stop rationalizing.

 

At Children’s Museum of the Arts, we believe art is fundamental and needs no justification. So we’re building a new way of doing things: a Progressive Arts Pedagogy.

 

Our roots are in the Progressive Education movement, which sought to integrate the arts and vocations into the classical academic curriculum. But while Progressive Education, as imagined by John Dewey, aimed to engender a more democratic society, Progressive Arts Pedagogy goes further, recognizing that the arts are the principal aim of that society, with democratization as an essential process toward that goal.

 

Progressive Arts Pedagogy is premised on the belief that talent isn’t rare, it’s just grossly mis-recognized and unduly stifled by traditional school structures and pedagogical methods. We seek to overcome these obstacles by creating a full-circle creative pedagogical pipeline, inspired by laboratory schools, but decentralized across a network of art institutions, schools, public and community spaces, art studios and homes everywhere.

 

Our program treats children, educators, artists, and audiences as mutual aesthetic learners, engaged together in the continuous experiment of creating a common culture.