Dear editor ,
Your article about Saving the Joys of Music and Art at the Church Street School really touches on the crisis in the deliberate de-funding, discouraging, music and art courses, (instrument, dance classes and school bands, workshops in all the created visual arts) that I know from personal experience have disappeared from the NYC public schools and elsewhere.
The sharing of the arts as an individual, participating in groups or as a viewer is one of the few universal ways that people share their humanity and joy that help to balance the daily stresses of daily inter-action and forget our early predatory heritage.
Math and science are key to our industrial and financial development, but will not help to keep us sane and happy no matter what the technocrats say.
This is beautifully portrayed in The Sound of Music when the martinet father hears his children singing led by their musical governess reminding him of his underlying lost, loving earlier human family connection no novitiate advisory words could do and is the persistent theme (title) of the musical.
This debasing and gradual disappearance of the arts that is a sincere sharing of ones true self in a public, creative unifying way may be responsible for the loss of the magnetic quality of sounds, images and writing that made the arts so influential and memorable in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that stirred deeper thought, emotions and bodies and now are constantly revived because of the vacuum.
Today more than ever, we need a renaissance of support for the arts (Romney said in his Presidential run he would de-fund the NEA, NPR, PBS) which was the first expression of our evolutionary humanity. It would help to counter the current intensified cultural influences promoting self-interest, competition, cruelty and violence and acting reflexively rather than reflectively that is embodied in the arts experience.
Sy Schleimer