www.huffingtonpost.com: Imagine a group comprised of accountants, tech executives, actors, corporate CEOs, playwrights and theater directors engaged in an urgent conversation. These rather divergent personalities are all discussing the state of theater education in America and its impact on our country's economy, culture and future. They all agree that our nation's future workforce can't afford a curtain call on creativity.
2 comments:
I come from an area that is more concerned with sports and the sciences than anything humanities or arts related. There's a strong clash between the minority of the population that supports the arts, and the majority that would rather just see the high school kids out playing lacrosse and football and getting some "old fashioned school spirit" going. I remember the board meetings that my class would attend and would publicly speak at in support of funding for our shows, in fact, just funding for our classes. My graduating class in the theatre had five of us that were extremely devoted to theatre, and we were the crusaders for writing letters to the newspaper editors, attending board meetings and speaking out, and especially going out into the community and proving our worth (ex. doing free cabarets for nursing homes). It was an uphill battle that had to be fought multiple times, but we won each time. We argued that the high school theatre program had improved our lives, and the lives of the underclassmen below us. Not only as healthy emotional beings, but better public speakers, being more confident, being more creative, and doing better in our academic classes. We argued that as were were taught to analyze a script to act a character, it made reading a novel in English class and analyzing what happened in it beyond easy. The merits of a theatre education in public schools are something that I fought four years for, and throughout my life I'll continue to push for public school children to be exposed to a theatre education.
I'm very happy to see a company such as Ernst and Young working to develop the creative education programs in this country. Their support is more evidence that an arts education is about more than just working in the arts- I believe that they value the skills that we have developed as creative practitioners. The article lists a number of them- writing, communication, thinking on your feet, etc, and I think some of these companies are realizing that many people in our generation and younger lack those skills because of a lack in creative experience and arts training. So its in their own best interest to keep training people. I only hope this realization will grow.
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