The Arts Should Be the Strongest Program in Education

This world that we are creating everyday seems to be the striving for the lowest common denominator. Somehow the idea gets spread around that the Arts are an unnecessary part of our society and that funding education in the arts and in our communities is somehow like throwing money away. 

I want to make the case that this is not the case at all. 

Music

First I will just make the arguments that are monetary. http://www.statista.com/topics/1639/music/

According to this website, which is one of many, the music industry was responsible for $15 Billion dollars in revenue in 2012. 

Film

The global film industry’s revenue was $88.3 Billion in 2014.
http://www.statista.com/topics/964/film/

Theater

Broadway shows revenue (for profit theater) was at $1.138 billion for New York in 2013. http://www.statista.com/topics/1299/theatre-and-broadway/

This site also shows that non-profit professional theater attendance was at 36.7 Million. Symphony and Opera attendance was at 16.59 million over the past 12 months in the period of the study and that the average cost per ticket for non-profit theaters was at around $35. 

Lets consider the simple fact that in any given high school or marching band you will have around 75 to 100 playing an instrument. Consider that in choral organizations in schools you may have just as many involved, some doing both. Lets assume you have 150 kids total involved in the arts at any reasonably sized high school and spread it across the entire country. 

This shows that there is revenue produced as a result of even amateur involvement in the arts and it includes students in worthwhile activities and offers a place for those talented few to excel. 

Consider all of the teachers of music, in the school systems, who teach privately, and people who own businesses that are involved with the arts, and the sum total of the spectrum of the arts gets to be rather large, don’t you think?

People who sit in offices and push papers around, and look at numbers grow grey in their personalities and it is these non-menschen that want to eliminate the very thing that would keep them from being the one dimensional nothings they are. They are the destroyers of souls. 

I did not go into the arts, into music because it was good for me, or to make money, I did it because it is my home. It is the home for a lot of people who don’t fit into some suit walking down the halls of a building filled with cubicles, fluorescent lights and grey carpets, grey suits and grey people. 

The very creative force of our nation depends on the arts to carry it forward into the future in practically every industry that exists. 

Some things are worth a lot more than the financial aspect that I am outlining here, and even if the bottom line isn’t as compelling as building weapons to kill people and never use, the battle front we are trying to win is the one inside people’s souls. 

Alfred Einstein once said…

 

The arts

are not a part of the equation

to creating a great society

it the sum of it.

 

Keep and increasing the support for the arts, music, dance, theater, painting, literature and whatever else there is to create. Why?

Because we need to think higher, more beautifully and more outside the box than the grey minds of soul-less pencil pushers sitting in cubicles looking at facts and figures all day long.