For the past 20 years, U. S. Secretaries of Education in every Administration have asserted the critical impact of arts education in the school curriculum:

• William Bennett (1986): An elementary school that treats the arts as a province of a few gifted children, or views them as recreational and entertainment, is a school that needs an infusion of soul. The arts are an essential element of education, just like reading, writing and arithmetic.






• Lamar Alexander (1992): If I were helping to rethink the curriculum of a school in my hometown, I would want instruction in the arts to be available to every student . . . and integrated into most of what we teach.






• Richard Riley (1998): I have long believed in the important role that music and the arts can play in helping students learn, achieve and succeed. Education in theatre, dance and the visual arts is one of the most creative ways we have to find the gold that is buried just beneath the surface. They [children] have an enthusiasm for life, a spark of creativity and vivid imagination that need training…training that prepares them to become confident young men and women. The creativity of the arts should be central to the education of every American child.

• Roderick Paige (2004): I believe the arts have a significant role in education both for their intrinsic value and for the ways in which they can enhance general academic achievement and improve students’ social and emotional development . . . The arts, perhaps more than any other subject, help students to understand themselves and others, whether they lived in the past or are living in the present . . . A comprehensive arts education may encompass such areas as the history of the arts, the honing of critical analysis skills, the re-creation of classic as well as contemporary works of art, and the expression of students’ ideas and feelings through the creation of their own works of art. In other words, students should have the opportunity to respond to, perform and create in the arts.

"Communities that support youth-based arts organizations do more than preserve and develop their youth for the future. They engage the creative energies of youth in positive ways that enrich community life and culture today.”

As environments for youth involvement in the arts during non-school hours, arts organizations emerged as somewhat different from organizations engaged primarily in community service or sports. In arts organizations (where plans come from the young people rather than being made for them), linguistic anthropologists found that students get extensive practice in developing future scenarios and pepper their sentences with “could,” “will,” and "can"—asserting possibility. These students also showed greater use of complex language than their peers involved in community-service or sports groups. Champions of Change, 19-34

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Funding for Woodruff 's Education Initiative was generously provided by The Goizueta Foundation, Robert W. Woodruff Foundation, Inc., The Kendeda Fund & an Anonymous Donor.

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Artwork featured in masthead: Tony Cragg, “New Figuration,” 1985. Plastic forms, Purchase with Collections Council Acquisition Fund in memory of Lenore E. Gold, 1996.6.