THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, May 3, 1996 TAG: 9605010092
SECTION: PORTSMOUTH CURRENTS PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Ida Kay's Portsmouth
SOURCE: Ida Kay Jordan
LENGTH: Medium: 84 lines
If little children don't learn to enjoy the arts, odds are they will not learn later what a difference the arts can make in life. And for those who never learned, it's pretty hard to sell them on the importance of spending money to expose young children to music and painting, the theater and dance.
Sadly, at a campaign forum Monday night at Petrofka Gallery, most candidates didn't have many suggestions of how we can get more money for the arts in schools.
``I'm a fisherman who plays classical music while I fish,'' said David Joyner, a candidate for the School Board. ``I always wonder why the arts are the first to go when the budget is axed.''
Incumbent board member Larry I'Anson had a good answer: ``Arts are a hard sell when roofs leak or new math textbooks are needed. . . . But have I got a scheme to get more money for the arts? No.''
The answer, of course, would be money specifically earmarked for the arts, but City Council can't tell the School Board how to spend its operating budget money, even if the money was available.
And how do you get money earmarked for the arts anyway? Well, as council candidate Tommy Benn suggested, maybe we need a ``summit'' on the arts.
Certainly the 400 or more people who turned out on a Saturday in January for a crime summit impressed the powers-that-be. If we could get 400 arts lovers to come together and talk about the importance of arts to humanity, maybe we could get some attention.
The city already understands that museums attract people. Now if we can just get them to understand that those who support our museums are adults who learned a long time ago the pleasures of art.
Leisure time is abundant in our society. If you don't believe that, listen to your associates talk about the television they've been watching. Since I was lucky enough to grow up before television was built into the day, I seldom turn it on. In fact, it's so far from my mind that I forget to look at things I intended to watch.
Because the kids have so much leisure and generally spend too much time in front of a television set, maybe it would be a good idea to offer music and other arts classes as after-school options, a suggestion made by several candidates Monday night. Schools Board candidate Douglas Eames even suggested the schools could offer summer programs in the arts.
Of course, there's no doubt teachers should be paid extra for extra services, and parents probably would be asked to make up the difference by paying fees for the lessons. That's a good idea for those whose parents will make the effort and can afford the cost. But what about the others?
The arts definitely make a difference in life. They help people understand themselves; they give us insight we otherwise might never stumble across. Most of all, there is the pleasure from listening to symphonic music or the opera, from looking at art exhibits, from seeing a good play.
But you don't just wake up one day and say, ``I'm going to enjoy art.'' If you don't start learning something about the arts when you're very young, you might never know how much fun they can add to life.
In simpler times, when I went to school, we had little art books in elementary school that contained faithful reproductions of paintings by the old masters. To this day I can remember sitting in the classroom discussing ``Blue Boy'' and other famous paintings. We talked about the color and fabric of the clothing, the items the artists put into the background - simple things but the very things that prodded little children to look carefully at the pictures.
We also had a lot of music around us. I remember the old wind-up phonographs for playing 78 rpm records the teachers had in the classrooms. And don't forget the rhythm bands with the wood blocks, sticks and triangles that every elementary school had.
Furthermore, ``Miss Hattie,'' my principal for all my grade school years, was a frustrated show girl who staged a big song-and-dance production every year and expected every kid to participate. Certainly, that gave us all an appreciation of the theater and of the arduous work it takes to put any show on a stage even if we never wanted to walk on a stage again.
All of this started many of us on the way to a life made 100 percent better by the arts.
At some point, those of us who can't imagine life without art must be as vocal on behalf of arts in the schools as citizens have been about fighting crime or building more ball fields or buying more computers for the schools.
Almost to a person, the candidates Monday night said the pressure must come from the taxpayers. by CNB