"The arts are utterly useless..."

John Adams, NOT the founding father

....So we would believe when viewing the massive cuts being made to arts education programs throughout the country.  It seems to have started in 1978 in California, with the passing of the now-infamous Proposition 13, "the People's Initiative to Limit Property Taxation."  The California schools, once the best in the nation, have decreased to 48th in standard measures of academic achievement, and this is IN SPITE OF huge decreases in funding for arts in the public schools. 

Of course, California is no longer the exception but the rule.  Schools throughout my own state of Iowa are facing similar cutbacks because of an intransitive governor's refusal to allow local schools to raise enough operational support.  The idiocy in the Iowa funding model is that our local school district has the ability to practically rebuild every building in the district and yet is still facing another substantive layoff of teaching personnel.  Over a year ago the instrumental music staff was cut by 25% but the district countered by eliminating instrumental music in the fourth grade.  However, through the hard-fought recruiting and retention efforts of the current staff, enrollments--especially in the lower grades--are again reaching peak levels.  We are seeing elementary "specialists" stretched particularly thin, being forced to offer instruction in as many as seven different schools.

But of course, "the arts are utterly useless..." at least according to composer John Adams, in his commencement address to the 2011 graduating class at the Julliard School.  In part he stated,

The wonderful, astonishing truth is that the arts are utterly useless. You can't eat music or poetry or dance. You can't drive your car on a sonnet it or wear it on your back to shield you from the elements. This "uselessness" is why politicians and other painfully literal-minded people during times of budget crises (which is pretty much all the time now) can't wait to single the arts out for elimination. For them artistic activity is strictly after-school business. They consider that what we do can't honestly be compared to the real business of life, that art is entertainment and ultimately non-essential. They don't realize that what we artists offer is one of the few things that make human life meaningful, that through our skill and our talent and through the way that we share our rich emotional lives we add color and texture and depth and complexity to their lives. 

A life in the arts means a life of sacrifice and tens of thousands of hours of devotion and discipline with scant remuneration and sometimes even scant recognition. A life in the arts means loving complexity and ambiguity, of enjoying the fact that there are no single, absolute solutions. And it means that you value communicating about matters of the spirit over the baser forms of human interaction, because you know that life is not just a transaction, not simply a game about winning someone's confidence purely for purposes of material gain. 

What we artists offer is one of the few things that make human life meaningful!!  This must become our mantra.  This, or a form of it, needs to be emblazoned over every doorway of every music classroom in the nation.  While math and science have no difficulty establishing their (necessary) place in our schools' curricula, thus is the same for art.  Life without art is life without meaning.  A life without music would be a quiet and lonely place.  We musicians, writers, sculptors, painters and all the rest need to make this our battle cry--especially in these most trying of times.  If the arts are allowed to be eliminated or left to whither on the vine, we'll never get them back and we will lose the greater part of our humanness.