The arts-visual arts, theater, music, and dance challenge and extend human experience. They provide means of expression that go beyond ordinary speaking and writing. They can express intimate thoughts and feelings. They are a unique record of diverse cultures and how these cultures have developed over time. They provide distinctive ways of understanding human beings and nature. The arts are creative modes by which all people can enrich their lives both by self-expression and response to the expressions of others.

The arts disciplines are basic: as means of communication, as historical components of civilization, and as providers of unique forms of knowledge. As such, they need no other justification as essential components of education.

Because of their fundamental role in civilization, because of their unique ability to exalt the human spirit and enhance the quality of life, and because of their enduring capacity to enthrall and delight human beings and transform the human experience, the arts are destined to play a major role in society as far into the future as anyone can see.

[The arts] are the means by which a civilization can be measured.... [They] are an essential part of the human experience. They are not a frill.... These skills are no longer just desirable. They are essential if we are to survive together with civility and joy.

[There] are three areas of subject matter indispensable to basic schooling -language, literature, and the fine arts; mathematics and natural sciences; history, geography, and social studies. Why these three? They comprise the most fundamental branches of learning. No one can claim to be educated who is not reasonably well acquainted with all three.

The first curriculum priority is language.... The second curriculum priority is a core of common learning -a program of required courses in literature, the arts, foreign language, history, civics, science, mathematics, technology, health - to extend the knowledge and broaden the perspective of every student....

Great achievements in the arts are the hallmarks of civilization. Generating conditions to encourage these achievements is essential business for any society.

The purpose of education is to open minds and to provide the substance and enthusiasm for continued personal discovery and growth.

The curriculum in the crucial eight grades leading to the high school years should be specifically designed to provide a sound base for study in those years in such areas as English language development and assisting computational and problem solving skills, science, social studies, foreign language, and the arts. These should foster an enthusiasm for learning and the development of the individual's gifts and talents.

Strong elementary/secondary education programs in the arts are essential for the continuing development of our nation's cultural promise ... The arts enterprise in higher education is committed to elementary/secondary education in the arts. The training of specialist teachers in the arts, essential for the development and operation of curricula which develop literacy is a major priority.

... each elementary/secondary school student should be afforded the opportunity to develop basic literacy in the arts disciplines. This should be a fundamental component of education for every student. The benefits of this policy would be the development of citizens:

No nation in the world now matches in scale and geographic distribution the personnel, curricula, and facilities for education in the arts in the United States. Our resources should be considered as a base for building the future, recognizing that in many cases vast improvements are needed to bring specific educational efforts up to reasonable standards.

... Even though many resources exist, there are societal problems and issues which influence the nation's capability to educate in the arts. Improvement can occur only when there is:

Why is the assumption so often that music is not basic, rather than that it is? ... Perhaps the difficulty is not that music as a discipline is seen as a frill but that some of the activities that take place in the name of music instruction are seen as frills. Perhaps we need to be more careful to ensure that our instructional practices are consistent with our announced objectives. Perhaps we should be more sensitive to the perception of the public as to whether or not our programs represent learning that is truly basic. ...The extent to which our programs flourish, or in some cases survive, may depend in part on the extent to which we adopt this perspective and teach music as a basic discipline.

Substantive education in the arts is a major component of the future development of American civilization. The federal government should use the variety of means at its command to explain this fact to the nation. The federal government can and should be effective in assisting with basic research, pilot projects and follow-up studies, and other developmental activities. Beyond its own service-oriented development efforts, the federal government should approach arts education in the way that is has approached professional presentation of the arts.

What society needs more than anything else at this point is definitely not the single-minded pursuit of high tech. It is the reintegration of the arts into everyday life.

Music can provide a wonderful vehicle for us to communicate our innermost feelings to each other in a very unique way, and it can help us share thoughts and ideas without prejudice. Music has the power to take us beyond the concerns of everyday living and to conceive ways of revealing the beautiful aspects of our society.

The crisis of arts education ... forces us back to the question of why Americans continue to regard culture as a rather dubious, peripheral undertaking. Something not quite serious. Something incidental to the more serious business of making a living and getting ahead in the world....

The decline in quality of artistic production has taken place at the very same time that art has come to be taken more seriously than ever before.... It has come to enjoy the esteem formerly reserved for religion. Indeed the difficulty may be not that art isn't taken seriously, but that it's taken more seriously than is good for it. It's been cut off from the rest of life and put on a pedestal ....

The task is, not to enlarge the market for the fine arts, not to aid art lovers and enlighten consumers of culture, but rather to ... achieve an integration between art and everyday life.

Students are inspired by individual teachers rather than by administrative systems or curricular plans. Exceptional teaching, like exceptional artistry, requires great talent. Therefore, colleges and universities must be concerned with the preparation of outstanding arts educators at all levels of instruction. Quite simply, excellent teachers are the crucial factor in arts education as they are in all education.

When educational reformers stress the importance of what they normally call the basics, reading and writing, I try to remind them that what is really basic is thought -that reading and writing are in fact only the agents of synthesis of cogent knowledge.

We in the arts world need to join the world of education, parents, and students, in making the arts a basic part of education. What we are talking about is coalition building to implement what the Harris polls say is the overwhelming wish of most Americans -to have more and better arts education. :" We do not propose utopian dreams, but rather marginal influence that may over time result in improvements.

Education consists of two distinct things: Knowledge and Understanding. They might be labeled Learning and Apperception, or even, in their widest sense, Science and Philosophy. Thinkers discovered, ages ago, that some things are matters of fact, verifiable by reference to standards of measurement .... All such knowledge falls into the domain of Science.

The same thinkers saw clearly that there were other matters in which no yard-stick could be applied .... These immeasurable and imponderable matters fall into the domain of Philosophy.

Although the subjects falling into the category of Science are of the very greatest consequence to the human race ... yet it is in the category of Philosophy that we find all the matters about which men feel deeply. It is Politics, Art, and Religion that stir men's hearts and tempers. The great minds of the world have thought persistently on these things, opening many avenues and warning us of many pitfalls.

The unthinking people of the world, those who imagine that the end of Education is information, have always been the drag on its wheels. It should, in their opinions, be exclusively utilitarian, preparing a man for the career he is to follow.

... Information, it may readily be granted, must be the foundation of all education; but not its end and aim. There is, I think, an almost perfect analogy in food. We need health and strength, so we eat and drink; but food is not in itself health and strength", for these depend on what our digestion does with our food. We need education, and so we acquire information; but our education depends on what our Intellect -which is our mental digestion -does with the information provided.

... The Greek philosophers pointed out that a man has four sides to his nature, these four sides, as it were plaited together, constituting the whole man. They form four categories, and every human activity can find its place in one or the other of them. These four sides are:

To you and me, as musicians, there is a special interest in the third strand -since it is the one round which the main business of our lives is entwined. One of our claims is that Art should take its place in the education of every child....

The real aim of those who teach any branch of Art should be, not merely to produce a select few who will paint or play better because of our teaching, but to awaken and stir the imagination of the whole body; that is our only true justification for pleading for Art in Education.... Make a list, one day, of the men and women of History to whom you would grant the epithet "great". Plato and Socrates, King Alfred and Napoleon, Florence Nightingale, Darwin, Newton: add or subtract as you choose, you will find but one quality common to all of them. Some were good, some bad; some had great intellectual power, some small; but everyone on any possible list will have had vision". They worked on the same material that was at everyone's disposal, and their imagination transmuted it.

...What means are there for developing and training this great quality of Imagination, without which bare facts can never cluster round a dream? The only method which human wit has ever devised for such a purpose is Art.

Consider education not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates and reigns, nor merely the necessary preparation of the individual to earn his keep in the world, but as the transmission of our mental, moral technical and aesthetic heritage as fully as possible to as many as possible, for the enlargement of man's understanding, control, embellishment, and enjoyment of life.

The heritage that we can now more fully transmit is richer than ever before. It is richer than that of Pericles, for it includes all the Greek flowering that followed him; richer than Leonardo's, for it includes him and the Italian Renaissance; richer than Voltaire's, for it embraces all the French Enlightenment and its ecumenical dissemination. If progress is real despite our whining, it is not because we are born any healthier, better, or wiser than infants were in the past, but because we are born to a richer heritage, born on a higher level of that pedestal which the accumulation of knowledge and art raises as the ground and support of our being. The heritage rises, and man rises in proportion as he receives it.