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Children need exposure to the arts and culture while in school

By Kenneth Kowald

It seems generally agreed that music and the arts in our schools have suffered from a lack of support for many years.

I started school during the Great Depression, first on the Lower East Side, then in Borough Park and finally in Elmhurst and Maspeth. All the schools had arts components in them.

When I attended JHS 73 in Maspeth, we had a marvelous music teacher, whose name, if I remember correctly, was Miss McGuirk. I do not recall a first name and “Ms.” did not exist then.

My parents had good singing voices and liked to sing, so although I had no training in music, I learned to love it at an early age.

During one of Miss McGuirk’s classes, I realized I had a tune in my head and that it went with a poem we had read by Robert Burns. Yes, we read Burns and other great writers at an early age in those days. The poem was “Highland Mary” and one day I got the courage to tell the teacher that I had “written music” to it in my head. She thought enough of it when I sang it to her to write it down and have it sung in an assembly.

At JHS 73, an English teacher proposed that the school put on a marionette show of “Julius Caesar.” Not only did those of us who got parts have to learn the play — we did it uncut — but we had to learn to manipulate the marionettes. I was a senior and my voice had changed. At first, I was assigned to play Cassius, but the Brutus was a freshman, whose voice had not changed. The teacher decided we should exchange roles.

Eventually, at graduation, this led to me being given a medal for a one-boy performance of the quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius in a declamation contest.

My first visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art was with my Newtown High School class. An English teacher at Newtown took a group of us to see a Saturday matinee of “As You Like It” at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village. I had not seen a professionally produced play before.

These days, the arts seem tangential to what is being taught. Not enough money? Too much pressure of having to learn so much more?

It is sad to think that at the time of the Great Depression and beyond, our city could vigorously support the arts in our schools, but we find it so hard to do so now, even in times of economic well-being.

The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies reports that state aid for the arts dropped 42 percent during the last decade. That is since Bill Clinton left the U.S. presidency with a budget surplus and we have engaged in two wars, cut taxes for the rich, gotten ourselves into a recession and its aftermath and decided that this country seems no longer to be able to do anything right.

Will the arts return for the children in our schools? Shouldn’t we ask ourselves what life is like without the arts? A critic in The New York Times wrote: “Art, after all, is one of the places where the pursuit of happiness gains focus and purpose and starts expanding outward, to aid and abet that thing called the greater good.”

The motto of the National Endowment of the Arts is “A great nation deserves great art.”

Are our students getting the benefit of that motto? I doubt it.

I leave the answers to the educational philosophers. For me, those experiences at JHS 73 and at Newtown High School were something that shaped my outlook on the world.

I believe I became a better person because of them.

Please read my blog, “No Holds Barred,” at timesledger.com.