Public Education and the Arts: Lessons From the New Deal

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Public Education and the Arts: Lessons From the New Deal

Thursday, 19 December 2013 00:00
By Sheila D Collins, Truthout | Opinion


On December 9, 2013, at more than 100 sites across the country, teachers, parents, students and labor and community allies rallied in a Day of Action to Proclaim the Promise of Public Education. Among the common complaints were a lack of resources for their schools, the loss of programs they feel are vital to a rounded education, such as art and music, and inequality in school funding. Just two days before those events, in northern Manhattan, several unemployed actors and musicians, all PTA parents, were braving a bitterly cold day in the schoolyard selling Christmas trees to pay for after-school programs and class trips for their children's public school. In a mixed-income neighborhood such as theirs, parents often must work odd hours or at more than one job; thus after-school programs are essential. Other parents from this school work tirelessly to raise funds to restore part-time art, music and science teachers to the school - resources that have fallen to the axe of an austerity-driven politics. The unemployed actor in charge of the Christmas tree sale, who had rented a truck and driven to Pennsylvania to get the Christmas trees, had just come off another marathon fundraising event for the school - the production of an evening of Broadway-caliber entertainment performed by professional actors, dancers and musicians who are among the school's parent body.

These fundraising efforts constitute months of full-time, unpaid work for parents like these. This public school is fortunate to have parents who have the time and talent to devote to such projects, but other schools are not so lucky. They have seen programs cut and schools close with no other recourse. And this unemployed actor would much prefer to be working for pay at his craft instead of running around to local merchants to solicit ads for the Schoolapaloosa playbill or driving hundreds of miles to a tree farm to cart trees back to a city schoolyard.

If this were the Great Depression instead of the Great Recession, these parents would not have to be engaged in endless fundraising efforts to pay for what should be provided as a matter of course in a decent public education system. During the Great Depression, thanks to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation - an independent federal financing institution - thousands of laid-off teachers' salaries were paid while the Public Works Administration (PWA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) built thousands of new schools across the country and refurbished others. If this were the Great Depression, the unemployed actor might very well be employed in his own profession, in one of the programs of the Federal Theatre Project funded by the WPA. He would be providing first-class entertainment at no or low cost to audiences that had never had access to professional theater before. The Federal Theatre Project gave unemployed actors, musicians, dancers, playwrights, set designers, directors and stagehands a leg up in desperate times. It gave aspiring new playwrights an opportunity to stage their work. It gave ethnic audiences - who may never have seen their own heritage depicted on stage - the opportunity to both see and portray it. And the Federal Theatre Project developed, in exploratory ways, new uses for theater talents in the fields of education, therapeutics, diagnosis, social and community work. Along with the other New Deal arts programs, the Federal Theatre Project democratized and de-commodified the arts and left a rich legacy of cultural history, artifacts and aesthetic experience that historians are only now beginning to appreciate. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20702-public-education-and-the-arts-lessons-from-the-new-deal