On Common Ground: Number 8, Winter 1998
From the President's Committee
By John Brademas
On August 14, 1997, I was among those present in the Rotunda of the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C., when President Clinton and the First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, announced a White House Millennium Program in order, in the President's words, "to honor the past and to imagine the future." The Program, he said, "will guide and direct America's celebration of the millennium by showcasing the achievements that define us as a nation—our culture, our scholarship, our scientific exploration."
As Chairman, by appointment of President Clinton, of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, of which the First Lady is Honorary Chair, I was obviously gratified that with this announcement, the President and she had endorsed the principal recommendation of Creative America, the report to the President of our Committee, released earlier this year. In our report, we urged the President to "lead our country into a new century and the next millennium" through an initiative that would "involve all Americans in preserving our cultural heritage and in appreciating creativity through the arts and the humanities."
We recommended these major actions:
- A national initiative to renew American philanthropy for the arts and the humanities, and for other charitable purposes;
- An assessment of the nations's preservation needs and a plan to protect our cultural legacy;
- A public-private partnership to digitize cultural materials to make them available through new technologies;
- A series of measures to strengthen education in the arts and the humanities;
- An investment in national leadership through gradual increases in funding for the grant-making cultural agencies to reach a level of spending equal to $2 per person by the year 2000.
In describing our proposals for "Educating Youth for the Future," the President's Committee urged these steps:
- Require course work in the arts for high school graduation; include the arts and the humanities in college entrance requirements; oblige elementary teachers to complete course work in the arts before certification;
- Set high local, state and national standards to evaluate students' progress through periodic assessment at all levels, using the National Assessment of Educational Progress as a guideline.
- Teach America's cultural traditions at every level and help enlarge students' understanding of the history and culture of other countries.
- Require competency in a foreign language for high school graduation and entrance into college.
- Conduct research on the effects of learning through the arts on student achievement, individual development and positive social behavior.
- Support programs that offer advanced training in the arts and humanities for students with special promise.
The President's Committee also recommends "partnerships" to:
- Provide professional development for teachers and urges strengthening existing programs at the Department of Education, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Endowment for the Arts.
- Include the arts and the humanities in programs that enhance the development of children, and improve their readiness for school and for entering the workforce by expanding collaborations among federal cultural agencies and other federal agencies that administer programs affecting children and youth. These collaborations should operate at the state and local levels as well.
- Expand programs, especially for at-risk youth, both in schools and in settings outside school.
- Extend business-education partnerships that create programs to support the arts and the humanities in the nation's schools.
Of particular note, and in part inspired by the success over nearly two decades of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, the President's Committee calls for partnerships to "improve instruction in the arts and the humanities by encouraging colleges, universities and cultural organizations to cooperate with local school systems . . . [as well as to provide] incentives to college and university faculty to develop collaborations with school teachers, educational administrators, and artists".
As President Clinton said at the National Archives:
" . . . [T]o make this new Millennium our own . . . . [f]irst and most important, we are making education our children's first priority . . . ."
Teachers in the arts and the humanities need the time and resources to participate in professional development to enrich their own knowledge and to gain practical ideas for their classrooms. At the community level, innovative partnerships have formed among some universities, cultural institutions, and school districts. Yale University and the public schools of New Haven, Connecticut have worked in partnership since 1978 to strengthen teaching in the city's schools. The Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute brings college faculty and school teachers together on an equal footing to develop new course material in the humanities and the sciences, and to discuss issues chosen by the teachers themselves.
The power of the arts and the humanities to develop creativity, help close the "opportunity gap," and prepare all children for productive futures is well documented in the Committee's report, Coming up Taller: Arts and Humanities Programs for Children and Youth at Risk. This study reveals the often heroic work that many arts, humanities and community organizations perform to serve at-risk youth. More public and private investment in these programs can provide creative alternatives to destructive behavior and divert some young people from gangs, drug use, crime and other anti-social behavior.
One sure way of achieving this objective is to encourage communities throughout the United States to establish the kind of partnerships pioneered by the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute.