Will Trumps Proposed Budget Cut Arts Funding in Schools
Pete Ryan
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Every spring, Sally Ritzdorf, a 2nd- and third-grade teacher at Howells Community Catholic School in Howells, Nebraska, loads 25 students onto a school omnibus bound for Omaha. It's a ninety-minute ride, and so the kids pass many miles ignoring the John Deere tractors pulling planters across freshly tilled fields in favor of watching videos on their phones or playing on their handheld game systems. But when they accomplish the edge of the city, the devices go put away, and the students grow wide-eyed. "If y'all could hear them when they're merely riding on the omnibus," Ritzdorf says with a laugh. "Oohing and ahhing at the traffic and the large buildings." For some of these kids from a town of barely 550 people, this is the commencement time they have ever been to a urban center—or been able to experience some of what a urban center has to offer.
The kids at Howells Community Cosmic go through a three-year rotation of field trips to Omaha, visiting the Joslyn Art Museum, the Rose Theater, and the Omaha Symphony Orchestra. This year, the students prepared for months to hear the orchestra, listening to recordings, learning about different composers, and traveling to Howells-Dodge Consolidated High School to see some of the instruments. Fifty-fifty the high school is too small to have a full orchestra, so as the students file into the performance in Omaha, they are often seeing the entire complement of instruments for the kickoff time. Ritzdorf loves the audio of their excited whispers. "In that location'due south the bass! In that location's the timpani!" Simply the real payoff, she says, is when the musicians lift their instruments and look the conductor's cue. "The await on the students' faces is priceless when they come across the orchestra begin to play for the first fourth dimension and see merely how the real instruments piece of work together to make the music nosotros have been listening to for months."
But at present, those annual field trips are at risk. Howells Customs Catholic is only ane of dozens of schools beyond Nebraska that receive complete funding for their arts field trips through the Nebraska Arts Quango'southward School Autobus for the Arts program. And the council, in turn, receives about a third of its funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. With the announcement in March that President Donald Trump'south proposed budget would eliminate the NEA and its sis organization, the National Endowment for the Humanities, many arts and humanities educators are wondering whether the money that provides arts exposure for their students is about to disappear completely. "It's pretty scary," Ritzdorf tells me. If the School Bus for the Arts were to become away, her kids might never see a professional play, hear a live symphony, or visit an art museum. "It's our sole source," she says.
If the White House and Republicans in Congress practise move forward with shuttering the ii federal cultural agencies, it would exist bitterly ironic—because those institutions were one time radically reshaped to back up the very kinds of programs that at present confront defunding. The NEA and NEH were founded in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson'due south Keen Gild agenda. For that reason lonely, they drew the ire of conservatives, but the resistance to fine art funding outset coalesced in the early on days of Ronald Reagan's presidency. Republicans advocated the elimination of both agencies, but a special chore force that included Reagan's onetime Hollywood buddy Charlton Heston convinced the president not to ax their funding. Nevertheless, Reagan appointed chairs like Lynne Cheney, who was intent on ferreting out "anti-Western" scholarship and imposing new "standards-based" requirements to insert into school curricula.
At the outset of George H.Westward. Bush's presidency, the American Family Association helped revive opposition to the NEA by highlighting its indirect funding of controversial works by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, arguing that they were anti-Christian and sexually deviant. Today, the debate is less pointed. Novelist Marie Myung-Ok Lee suggests that Trump has not targeted arts and humanities funding for any religious or philosophical reason. "The NEA and NEH are in Trump's sights because they promote the expression of the messy, complex American spirit," she wrote for Quartz. "Fine art is not tractable, containable, or fifty-fifty easily defined. That makes it the very contrary of what autocrats want: propaganda." Trump, for his function, wrote that his cuts are part of an endeavor "to move the nation toward fiscal responsibility." However, of the less than $300 one thousand thousand allocated to the NEA and NEH, about 40 percent goes directly to state arts and humanities councils, which support arts education in public schools, local oral history projects, art therapy and writing workshops for military veterans, and literacy programs at public libraries. At the national level, the NEA and NEH take funded everything from Ken Burns' documentary The Civil War and the Library of Congress' Chronicling America newspaper archive to Sesame Street and a theater "incubator" where an early on version of Hamilton was workshopped. (Full disclosure: I received an NEA poetry fellowship in 2003 and take as well gotten funds from the NEH through the Walt Whitman Annal.)
Trump'southward eagerness to eliminate the NEA and NEH may be driven past nada more than a hope to make overreaching tax cuts appear to balance out by enacting deep and harmful spending cuts. And the arts and humanities are easy targets. Arts funding disproportionately benefits minor, rural states, where the retentiveness of the culture wars looms large. Senators and representatives may believe they tin defend the cuts by villainizing the NEA and NEH as bastions of cultural elites. Even George Volition, who claimed to have quit the Republican Party because of Trump, couldn't resist praising the president's program to impale the NEA. Writing in the National Review, Will insisted we cannot fifty-fifty define art, much less what its "public purpose" might be. "We subsidize soybean production," he wrote, "simply at least we tin say what soybeans are. Are NEA enthusiasts serene almost government stipulating, equally information technology must, art'southward public purposes that justify public funding?"
Of class, today'south NEA and NEH were reshaped by the quondam guard of the Republican Political party to stipulate exactly that—and to give generous benefits to children in states that traditionally vote Republican. If Trump zeros out funding and eliminates the national endowments for the arts and humanities, it will be nonetheless some other mode in which the new president has betrayed his base.
Source: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/09/trump-wants-to-slash-americas-arts-budget-his-base-has-the-most-to-lose/
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