Arts Struggle in San Diego : Cutbacks: A music teacher rails against a society that relegates the education of its children to a back burner.

“If the school system were a corporation, it would have gone belly up a long time ago. It’s a very shoddily run operation.”

Seated on a restaurant terrace overlooking the main courtyard of a Mission Valley shopping mall, Point Loma High School music teacher Francis Thumm is assessing the current fiscal crisis in public education and how it affects his job.

By nature, Thumm, 42, is a hail-fellow-well-met who dispenses quantum amounts of conviviality and punctuates conversation with a pirate’s laugh. On this occasion, his hearty discourse on everything from women to his beloved San Diego Padres has captured the attention of lunchers 20 feet away.

But Thumm’s expressive face clouds over and his tone turns serious at the mention of the budget crunch that continues to hamstring education, nowhere more so than in fine arts.

“Education is starving, there’s just no money,” he said. “I think California is in the bottom half of the whole country in how much we spend per student. It’s ridiculous. There are states we probably feel culturally superior to, like Alabama, that spend more than we do per student. And, of course, for the arts it’s even worse.”

Thumm’s disgust is directly proportional to his passion for the arts, and especially for music. His interest and involvement in the latter is eclectic, to say the least.

A pianist by training, Thumm attended University High School and, after graduation, took part in an “intense” workshop on liturgical choral music conducted in Nebraska by Roger Wagner. Thumm went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in music at San Diego State University and continued his piano studies at Indiana University under Michel Bloch.

In 1982, Thumm attended a conducting seminar offered by the L.A. Philharmonic and taught by the late Leonard Bernstein, with whom, over dinner, he discussed favorite Beatles albums, Maria Callas, and Bernstein’s and Igor Stravinsky’s love of Scotch whiskey.

Thumm’s recording credits, meanwhile, include performing on, co-arranging and serving as musical adviser on several albums by his close friend, singer-actor Tom Waits.

Thumm passes enthusiasm to his students with an almost evangelistic zeal. For the past 13 years, he has been teaching songwriting, chorus and general music courses at Point Loma. His comprehensive approach, dedication, and non-authoritarian manner engender a productive rapport with students, many of whom call him years after graduation to report significant musical and life experiences.

“The whining educator is such a stereotype,” he said. “You know, ‘Shut up and leave us alone, you’ve got the lottery, you get three months of the year off, quit whining, we don’t want to hear about how broke you are.’

“I understand that attitude,” he said. “I say, ‘Give me a room with chairs, a piano and some sheet music, and I can teach choir.’ There are directors in this city who have produced some of the finest choral ensembles around--singing Renaissance music beautifully, prepping for college and all that--with very little financial assistance.

“So there is that constant . . . that if you want to educate badly enough you can manage it according to your own personal resources and personal dynamics. There’s a part of me that adheres to that philosophy because the success of any arts program depends on the qualities you bring to it.”

The bigger part of Thumm, however, rails against a society that relegates the education of its children to a back burner.

“The fact remains, I have to beg to take field trips because we don’t have a budget for that,” Thumm said. “If we want to attend, say, the San Diego Opera, we have to pay for the bus ourselves. So you end up selling chocolates or something. I remember doing that when I went to Catholic school, and now the public schools are doing it.”

Thumm concedes that, on occasion, a request for money to do something special gets approved, thanks to various trust accounts. But he characterizes the acquisition process and its rare successes as “strictly minor-league stuff.”

“I’m not a good salesman, and it’s very insulting and demeaning to me as a teacher to spend my time trying to get kids to sell candy so they can have the kind of educational experiences they need and deserve,” he said.

“Every time I ask these kids to organize a car wash or something, I feel like I’m playing into the hands of the bureaucrats who created this monster in the first place. It’s as though I’m saying, ‘OK, you’ve whipped me, so now I’m gonna go down to bleeping Horton Plaza with a monkey and a tin cup and beg for this stuff.’ It’s not in my character to do that. I refuse to be one of George’s ‘thousand points of light.”

Thumm knows there are those who would make him feel guilty for not being more “resourceful” under the circumstances. He counters that his resourcefulness goes into his musical productions, his planning, his interaction with students and his preparations for class.

For example, he spends hours at home taping his own recordings of jazz, classical and other forms of music for use in his lectures. But Thumm is less than satisfied to use recorded music alone as a learning tool.

“The ideal would be to have a thousand dollars every year to play with,” he said. “Then I could bring in some jazz musicians, I could get someone to come and sing lieder, I could get a gospel choir to perform for us, I could take my kids to all five local operas. And there should be money to do that. . . . It’s doesn’t take that much, really. As it is, I do everything by the seat of my pants.”

Thumm traces the problem back to 1957, when the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite, inaugurating a scientific-technological race.

“Sputnik scared us into shifting our national focus and the energies of our scientists toward creating a new math and new technologies and away from human concerns,” he said. “As a result, we have had the humanistic heart slowly torn out of our educational philosophy. By now, it’s been inculcated to the point where everyone feels that, yeah, science and math and history are the core subjects.

“You look at the truly great societies, like ancient Greece, and the core subjects were math, music, and philosophy.”

Whether society changes its perspective on education vis-a-vis the arts, Thumm feels it is imperative that the school system realign itself to facilitate a more intellectually stimulating environment.

“The school system fails kids by not allowing an integration of various disciplines. But what’s worse is that it actually is set up to discourage it . . . physically and in terms of curriculum. For example, for me to get together with a math teacher to do a unit on musical intervals and the mathematics of music, or with a history teacher to discuss Napoleon in the time of Beethoven, or to study the effects of racism on the American music of the early 20th Century, would be a colossal effort. We would have to use a tremendous amount of our spare time and rearrange our schedules to do that.

“Yet, interdisciplinary integration is what makes learning an exciting experience, and it’s practically the only way to give proper perspective to the arts. But it’s never done! There are a few teachers at Point Loma starting to do that sort of thing now, but to achieve that sort of holistic approach to education, the entire system has to be changed to encourage and accommodate it.”

The encouragement of self-enlightenment, especially as it is derived from experiential phenomena, seems to be the cornerstone of Thumm’s educational philosophy.

“I had a series of experiences in my youth that were electrifying, although I think I was always on fire,” he said. “I had this big appetite, and I went out and pursued cultural enrichment. But I was lucky to have people around me who encouraged it. Every day, my parents drove me halfway across the city to piano lessons. From the time I was 8, I was going to operas and concerts. They bored me at the time, but eventually I saw them as theater and good show. I could relax in that environment.

“When you get exposed to great artists, that inspires you to want more,” he said. “I heard Rubinstein play piano when I was young, and I never missed another concert of his. I would go to L.A. or wherever to hear him, and I would go backstage and talk to him. There are experiences in life that change you forever, like hearing Duke Ellington’s band live. These are the kinds of experiences I want my students to have.”

As if on cue, a former student spots Thumm from across the terrace and ambles over. The young man’s speech and body language suggest a mixture of respect and amity as he excitedly updates the instructor on his post-secondary exploits. He seems genuinely pleased that Thumm remembers him. Thumm, too, seems energized by the brief encounter.

“Ultimately, the only thing you can impart to them is a sense of your immense passion for something,” he said after the young man left. “They might not remember a thing you’ve taught them, but they’ll remember your attitude.”