Dear Reader,

Even though I'm someone who often overlooks birthdays and anniversaries, those that end in zero usually catch my attention. That means that I’m clearing the calendar to be with my friend Keith for his sixtieth birthday this weekend and I’m listening to Purple Rain and Double Nickels On The Dime this summer more than I would otherwise.

This week marks 100 years since the birth of the always relevant James Baldwin, so it seems like a good one to spend some time with one of his texts. Amongst the treasures he left us with is his 1963 talk to teachers.

It’s a blistering read, challenging teachers to consider the purpose of education in a world filled with injustice and racism that the child is always making sense of. Baldwin demands that teachers stand in solidarity with children as they recognize the oppression they are surrounded by:

“I would try to make each child know that these things are the result of a criminal conspiracy to destroy him. I would teach him that if he intends to get to be a man, he must at once decide that he is stronger than this conspiracy and that he must never make his peace with it.”

I’ve revisited this talk many times over my years as a teacher and get something new from it every time. Because this reading falls in the midst of our two-month study of the role of the arts in living and learning in The Studio for Playful Inquiry, I’m struck by the way in which Baldwin articulates the purpose of education aligns with what we’ve been thinking about regarding the critical value of the arts.

Baldwin says,

“The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.”

“….I would try to make him know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger — and that it belongs to him. I would teach him that he doesn’t have to be bound by the expediencies of any given administration, any given policy, any given morality; that he has the right and the necessity to examine everything.”

I read that next to Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross’s articulation of why we need the arts:

“What the arts do to our brains and bodies allows us to give voice to important messages, reveal our emotions, drive innovation, spark creativity, raise ethical and moral issues, and shepherd in new eras of humanity…. the arts can be used to ease physical and mental distress, to learn more deeply, to galvanize community, and to help you flourish. The arts have been ushering in profound individual and societal change over millennia because they quite literally change our biology, psychology, and behavior in undeniable and profound ways.”

While the research backing these claims is substantial, few schools embrace that science. More often than not, we hold our children in humdrum environments where tools of the arts, if used at all, are viewed as extras and siloed to rare blocks of time.

Should we be surprised that this is the case during an era when state legislatures are demanding (purportedly) research-backed pedagogical approaches?

Baldwin would not be:

“But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society.”

In our conversation last month with Miriam Beloglovsky and Jesús Oviedo, a participant wondered aloud, “Is all art political?”

If we are pursuing the arts because they help people make meaning of their place in the world across lifetimes, to construct their identity, to hold space for revolutionary questions, to understand current conditions and imagine what might lie beyond them, then our investment in the arts is political.

And for some of the most vulnerable in our lives, the arts are the only way to comprehend and give voice to their lives. Magsamen and Ross share the words of palliative care director Abigail Unger:

“For children who don’t yet have the language or the developmental capacity to recognize and articulate what’s going on in their bodies, the arts offer an invaluable outlet. They are a language for everyone, of course, but the arts give children a means of expression when they don’t have words.”

And because of that, we should expect to encounter resistance in our principled advocacy for the rights of children to be immersed in the arts as tools for living and learning.

Again, Baldwin speaking directly to teachers: “You must understand that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not only in the classroom but in society, you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined resistance. There is no point in pretending that this won’t happen.”

Onward!

Yours in flourishing and freedom,

July and August in The Studio are months to think about well-being - our own and that of others in our community - and the role of the arts in that flourishing.

Monthly members are exploring that question through reading Your Brain On Art and other selections and hearing conversations with luminaries Miriam Beloglovsky, Jesús Oviedo, Sophie Anne Edwards, Georgia Heard, Cindy Foley, Kirsty Liljegren, and Kelly Goodsir. Adventurers registered for the course (including Transform Plan members, who have access to this and all Studio courses) get not only the readings and conversations but also extensive, immersive guided arts experiences, live gatherings, and so much more.

Don’t hesitate to reach out with questions.

WATCHING, LISTENING, READING

Good things:

• Alongside anniversaries marking decades since entering the world, I’m also moved by the ending of lives. Bernice Johnson Reagon - who taught us so much about song and civil rights - died earlier this month. Ella's Song seems a strong companion to this contemplation of the rights of children to artful lives.
• ​They searched for their spark and they found it.
• ​A group of children form The Modular Synthesizer Ensemble.
• ​You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what's inside you, and you have made your soul grow.​
• I just finished Stay True, Hua Hsu's coming of age exploration of friendship and memory and loss and identity. What's on your summer reading shelf?
• A radical contrast to the purpose of education and the role of the arts in it is presented in this article from The New York Times and the American Mind piece it led me to. Brace yourself before reading - these don't rightly belong under the header "Good Things" but are "things we should be aware of."

"Neuroscientific research is undergirding just how vital the arts are in early childhood development. Much of what we naturally do as play when we are young children - dance, sing, make-believe, role-play - are natural art forms. They work across the brain... and when brought into the classroom, the arts have been proven to help children develop the neural pathways that lead to improved empathy, self-awareness, and agency. They help children... to emotionally contextualize the range of human experience."

​— Susan Magsamen & Ivy Ross​

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