Schools Drawing a False Picture

A Harvard-educated writer and wife of an Armenian-born painter who emigrated from Moscow to the United States in 1990, Ashot is a volunteer art instructor at South Pasadena’s Marengo Elementary School, where one of her three children is a student.

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Is your school telling you it has an arts program? Before you assume that’s one more plus for the school and one more advantage for your kid, look closer. I am the arts program at my fourth-grader’s school. Me: an over-educated mother with three jobs, teaching experience and a lifetime of immersion in the arts.

“How could that be so bad?” you wonder. Welcome to today’s progressive public school environment in California, dead center in the bottom five of 50 states when it comes to teaching its young. (Obviously, affluence alone does not buy outstanding education, not even for the state that trumpets its status as the seventh-ranking economy of the planet.)

New to the school, I was a willing recruit to the parent-taught art program. And to be fair, volunteers were provided with fine reproductions, artist biographies and other essentials. But the minimalist aspects of the “program” were impossible to gloss over.

Total time in the classroom: 4.5 hours in three sessions. Subject matter strictly established--by whom I was never told. This year, our assignment was: one session on Leonardo, one on Picasso and one on Alexis Smith, an L.A. pop standard-bearer.

I prepared diligently for my debut. Time being limited, I saw my key challenge as making sure the students walked out with a few facts about Leonardo engraved in their memory.

The 90 minutes flew by. The students gazed at me in rapt attention. They grasped the importance of the concepts. Most important, they shyly began to volunteer their own knowledge (and misinformation), both of which turned out, in many cases, to be quite impressive.

So where was the problem? A teacher informed me--after ample praise--that the intent of the program was different from my approach. “We were expecting them to spend an hour drawing like Leonardo,” I was told.

Never one to rock the boat, I knew what would be expected of me for the Picasso segment. “Drawing like Picasso.” Why bother to prepare? Oh, I did try to pack a few nuggets of knowledge into my short intro. After that, I played referee while the students sketched obediently on their one sheet of construction paper, only to be chided by a teacher, “That’s nice, Jesse, but that doesn’t look like a Picasso!”

Now I know--children need to draw. Just like they need to sing. But don’t they also need to understand--when they’re 5, not 15--that there are extraordinary individuals who have driven civilization? And that great art is created by great discipline and hard work over years? Not by doodling for five minutes on bad paper with bad pencils. The idea that somebody can learn to draw like Leonardo in five minutes in the classroom is insulting to great art. In fact, they’re not learning about Leonardo or art history or really how to draw.

We have replaced the admittedly flawed art and music programs of the past with something even worse: a superficial, trivializing approach to these important intellectual pursuits. With the best intentions, an outstanding school, excellent teacher and well-meaning volunteers turned an enrichment program into a living parody of what it could be. Why? Because we have come to confuse process with content. We’ve replaced substance with sound bites, quality with fashion. Because, in California, we have lowered our classroom standards and made teachers live in fear of self-serving bureaucrats.

To the absent parents, though, all looks good. For in the name of cultivating a little applied art, the school is accomplishing one thing: creating something the kids can bring home. “Look, Ma, Art and Education Alive and Well in America!” But no one in my fourth-grader’s classroom was fooled. Not the overworked teacher or the underserved students or the three computers in continuous use. Oh, yes, the computers. These kids know how to work a keyboard. (Process over content!) What they will have to input in 20 years is what we need to ponder. “Look, Ma, I’m making formulas like Einstein!”