Good day,
I hope your inboxes are overflowing on the clear danger approaching Edmonds School District curriculum decisions.
STEM programs are all the talk these days and the career opportunities they carry. I cannot disagree. But to value STEM alone for betterment of our community without Arts is shameful.
If a citizen’s voice is confined to the hard sciences alone, will not a piece of the community’s heart wither?
For district students, Arts are only available in primary and secondary classrooms. Once graduated, there is no ready exposure. Most colleges direct new students toward majors or general prerequisites for majors. Here, Arts become “electives of interest” unless Arts are the student’s major. What will happen to college Arts Programs when districts do not expose all young students to Arts?
Those who join the workforce upon graduation may find Arts exposure as leisure. I dare think these are not a great number.
However, all ESD students exposed to Arts by requirement will carry with them into our community a small appreciation and recognition of the joys Arts can contribute to life. What a gift! How can we not provide this?
Your decisions now will affect our community at large not just students. Hereafter, decision range will be narrowed. This decision will never again be available.
Keep STEAM, not just STEM.
All my best,
Dennis Scherting
Edmonds
Mark Slouka wrote a brilliant essay in Harper’s Magazine in September 2009 entitled, “DEHUMANIZED: When Math and Science Rule the Schools” that explains how education has become an adjunct of big Business and the utilitarian cost-benefit analysis applied to children. Public school districts have forgotten what the true mission of education is: “We teach whatever contributes to the development of autonomous human beings; we teach to expand the census of knowledgeable, reasoning, independent-minded individuals…to teach people, not tasks; but to participate in the complex and infinitely worthwhile labor of forming citizens of a Republic capable of furthering what is best about us”. — Mark Slouka 2009.