Robin Lithgow was in charge of arts education for the Los Angeles Unified School District. She learned to deal with bureaucracy, frustration, and budget cuts, but she never lost her joy and passion for the arts and their power to change students’ lives.
Now in retirement, she has become a student of the history of the arts.she believes that the justification for the arts cannot be demonstrated with data. She is convinced that explorations into their history will awaken minds and draw them into sympathetic appreciation for the power of the arts.
Read this entry on “Good Behavior and Audacity” to understand where she is heading.
I am retired from the position of Director of the Arts Education Branch in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where for fourteen years I and dozens of amazing colleagues labored to bring the arts to the core of the academic day for every student at every grade level. Research supported our efforts; teachers and most administrators embraced the program enthusiastically; and the evidence poured in that students thrive in arts-rich schools….And yet, we were constantly amazed that we had to advocate, advocate, advocate, to fight each year for our modest funding and for our seat at the table with the decision makers at the head of the district.
Could it be that this was, at least in part, because of our lack of history? Education leaders keep asking us for our “data,” and the obsession for data certainly drives the political power battles in education across the country. We HAVE data, and tons of it, but it is “soft” data and cannot always be directly linked to the results being sought. Perhaps history could be more powerful than data.
So I launched my own research, and once I retired I was literally able to bask in it. Over the past six years I have written a book focusing on one brief period in history, that of the humanist education designed primarily by Desiderius Erasmus and enjoyed by the young William Shakespeare and tens of thousands of his peers in Elizabethan England.
The title of my book is Good Behavior and Audacity: Humanist Education, Playacting, and a Generation of Genius.
STEAM: Science, Technology, Engineering, ARTS, and Mathematics NOT just STEM.
The ARTS MATTER re: LEARNING. Helps us make connections.
Diane Thank you for this link. Also, here is a list of related articles in the Chronicle Review (Chronicle of Higher Education):
“Columbia Had Little Success Placing English Ph.D.s on the Tenure Track. ‘Alarm’ Followed, and the University Responded.” By Emma Pettit
“The graduate students want the department to open up its idea of what placement should be, the chair said. ‘We’re willing to do that, and we’ve started.’”
“The Humanities as We Know Them Are Doomed. Now What? By Eric Hayot
After previous crises, they bounced back. This time is different.”
“‘The Great Shame of Our Profession’ By Kevin Birmingham
How the humanities survive on exploitation.”
“Building a University for the Future”
“Emphasizing high-quality education, Kennesaw State University is creating interdisciplinary, innovative, and experiential educational opportunities for their students.”
The Chronicle Review newsletter@newsletter.chronicle.com
Mon 8/26/2019 5:00 AM
When they say they want “data”, they mean “test data”.
The huge irony, of course, is that there has been no discernable link between any of the so called “academic” (math and LA) programs of the deformers and test scores.
So it’s actually hilarious that these people demand test “data” as proof that policies work.
The whole “data game” is a worthless endeavor.
Oh, hardly worthless. In fact, it’s been worth a fortune.
A fortune from our pockets into the pockets of the deformers.
Test Data: Garbage in, garbage out
Decision-making based on standardized test data: garbage in, garbage out
Thank you, Diane! What a delight! I suppose that all of Europe, at the time, learned the art of the quip from Erasmus’s Colloquies. An example:
Shakespeare wrote:
Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet: Between who?
Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.
Erasmus wrote:
George: What’s that you tell me?
Livinus: That which you hear.
George: What is it I hear?
Livinus: That which I tell you.
George: O monstrous! Sure Mushrooms and Stones must be the Hearers where there are such Preachers.
And thank you, Ms. Lithgow, for attempting to rescue our children from the data mongers, who have sailed so far North in the opinion of decent folk as to hang like icicles on a Dutchman’s beard.
Something the data-mongering deformers could learn from Willie about teaching and learning:
“No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en.” –The Taming of the Shrew, Act I, scene i
Oh, wow! Another colloquia Erasmi reader! I’m not alone in the universe! How do I connect with you?
I wouldn’t call myself a scholar of this stuff. I’ve dipped into the colloquies a time or two in my life. Your BEAUTIFUL and INSPIRING essay sent me back to them, and I immediately spotted, thanks to your lead, this passage. Willie and I are old pals. I’ve edited a few of the plays, over the years, for high-school students. You can find me here, at my website, Robin: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/
I am very much looking forward to spending more time on your site and to reading your book! And thank you, thank you, thank you for fighting for a central place for the arts in K-12 education!!!!
Just signed up for your newsletter, Robin! I, too, have worked as a teacher of theatre (and of film).
And, Robin, I was looking for a button to subscribe to or follow your WordPress blog. Where do I find this? If you haven’t added one, you can do so. It took me quite a bit of time to figure out how to do that for my own WordPress site, but I was able to do so from within WordPress, without any third-party software.
Somewhere in the piles of books that alternately elude me for a time, then surface, is a book comparing the essays of Luther and Erasmus as they debated the issue of the freedom of the will. Great reading.
A great read, recently published, is “Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind,” by Michael Massing. It’s long, but utterly engrossing! It doesn’t spend much ink on Erasmus’ many writings on education though, which is the Erasmus I’m so enchanted with. But what a jolly and brilliant and fair minded fellow he was! I kept thinking: Erasmus is to Luther as Obama is to Trump.
Luther was a far deeper thinker than you credit him, but he was not capable of dealing with the peasant outrage his ideas produced, so he caved and went with the nobility. We humans, even the greatest among us, cannot see where our ideas lead.
In teaching second language learners, one of the most effective ways for students to overcome their inhibitions and fear of error is to teach language in a playful way. It is a very natural way to teach language. Students learn to speak and enjoy language through choral readings and shared readings. Other useful material that encourages beginning ELLs to have fun with language comes from Carolyn Graham and the English Language Institute at NYU. Her ‘Jazz Chant’ series were a staple in ESL programs for more than twenty-five years before so-called reform. “Reform” has sucked the joy out of learning as it has removed children from their natural state of playfulness. Test and punish is a dose of caster oil for the mind and spirit of children. It is training students to be passive rather than active learners. Pointing and clicking are not the same as engaging and enjoying. The arts ignite a creative spirit in young people while a steady diet of STEM and CAI often create a void.
Play is serious business. More of this. https://www.reddit.com/r/DaoIsTheWay/comments/anma54/life_is_a_stage_by_calvin_and_hobbes/
Thanks. nice link. Nat geo had an articl about how animals play some years ago. Seems the animals play a lot like they will work when they grow up. We seem to have lost that. The Choctaw sometimes played stickball with antagonists to settle matters without a costly war. The Chocktaw word for stickball means “little war.” In that case, they played so they would not have to work.
Love this, Roy!
Love this, Roy! One of my favorite books about play is Jonathan Balcolmbe’s Pleasurable Kingdom, which is about play among nonhuman animals. He speaks of crows that sled repeatedly, for the joy of it, down roofs at the Kremlin, of elephants who get gloriously drunk on fermented fruits, and of chimpanzees who sit in a circle and pass around an insect that they suck on because it excretes an hallucinogenic substance! A very brief piece of mine on play and the origins of art: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/03/18/play-and-the-origins-of-art/
All the world’s a stage. I think I am just now going through my adolescent one now. Would it not be interesting to see if some of those chimps were control freaks like me who refused the stimulus the way I refused drugs during my youth. Or if there were chimps that forced their play on other chimps. I bet that is strictly human.
I used to tell my students, if you take vodka and pour it around the base of a houseplant and come back in a few hours, you will find it dead or dying. This is because alcohol is a powerful POISON. I would then explain to them that their brains were the most complex and delicate systems that we know of and were still developing and that parts of those brains would not be complete until they were in their mid 20s. Not smart to bathe those developing systems in drugs and alcohol. Kind of like treating their cellphones to random electric shocks.
The data-mongering has aggressively metastasized throughout PreK-12 education. It’s now ruining what’s left of arts and sports education as well.
During the period that we are not, now, supposed to call the Dark Ages, the monks of Skellig Michael, in Ireland, sat in stone hovels at nearly the farthest edge of Europe, on cold Northern Atlantic, laboriously copying manuscripts and keeping learning alive. Likewise, some teachers are doing their best to ignore the morons who stop into their classes to ask, “What standard are you teaching now?” and “When was the last time you updated your data wall?” and are keeping alive, as best they can, humane learning, in literature, the arts, athletics, and history. Blessings on all those who do. The Dark Age of Deform is upon us, but this, too, will pass, is passing, as it becomes clearer, each day, how Deform has failed by its own absurd measures and wrung all the joy and value out of school.
It is a Dark Age. Idiocracy now. Good teaching is crushed by know-nothing “experts”.
Glad to see Robin digging into history for fresher, more cogent ideas about what constitutes a good education. But a caveat: just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s wise. There could have been just as many edu-charlatans back then as now.
Daisy Christodoulou says Shakespeare spent much of his education memorizing Latin writings.
Willie knew his Ovid, certainly!
In Shakespeare’s day, instead of asking teachers, “What standard are you teaching to?” they asked students, “Per quam Figuram?” What figure are you using? Which of Susenbrotus’ 132 rhetorical figures are you using in your speech and in your writing? 132! Fun!
Oh my Lord, Robin, that is glorious! I would be quite pleasantly surprised (and considerably less annoyed) if an administrator asked me that! I so look forward to learning more about all this from your book. As someone who worked for many years as a teacher and as a writer and editor of ELA textbooks, I have had a lifelong fascination with old rhetorics for students, and especially with the early English ones.
“Erasmus is to Luther as Obama is to Trump.”
Oh my Lord. That is just beautiful, Robin!
Shakespeare had Susenbrotus; our kids have Lucy Calkins. I’m waiting for the Lucy Calkins-weaned writing virtuoso to emerge (I have a feeling it will be a long wait).
I have often spoken of this astonishing theater arts program Improved Shakespeare created in Austin Texas, by my son’s wife, Andee Kinzy—as part of a homeschool coop. At age 7 and 8, the kids began to speak the bards words,—well , those great speeches and dialogue that Andee includes in each play, — in ways that offer meaning to today’s children. ..and they had fun. Lots of improv and conversation… like Andee offered my students when she offered Improvisation games in my Acting elective when I was teaching.
Did I mention how much fun they have LEARNING?
And if you get to 3:01 there is a conversation about gender roles, when a girl takes over the lead. (BTW this is all filmed in my son’s home)
Kids have so much fun as they learn to cooperate, to follow directions and so many social skills, besides learning to memorize lines, to speak clearly and to grasp complex ideas. Learning to do hard WORK is part of preparing for the adult world… but it can be fun, and it is rewarding. THAT is what theater arts offer children.
So, if you have the time, and you want to see something wonderful, created for kids, by a mother (and actress/filmmaker) who wanted theater arts in that home-school ..so she created it
The first link is Andee, herself introducing ‘Global Hamlet’.– bringing the bard to youngsters across the world (while traveling with my son for his business.)
Grandson Brant and sister Zia are in London for this clip… introducing Hamlet to kid, for the GLOBAL Hamlet project online. he is 12, she is 15. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylCBfft2OkI#action=share
But, to show you how. a child like Brant learns to speak like that— here he is at age 9, with his squeaky voice, as he played Grumio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXNDbXWIfrs. The laughter is Andee’s, who was sitting next to me! AND If you will indulge me, one more moment — here at marker (( at 25.40/40:46)) is Brant,– barely age 7– with the adorable girl who played Perdida:
Can you imagine if second grade kids in publics school had such a program?
Here is granddaughter Zia ( age 12) playing Petruchio…(yes… girls play male roles in an ironic twist on the Elizabethan era) https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1083256781705017
She also played Hamleta and Prospera.
This 2015 page offers insight into the production of taming of the Shew. http://improvedshakespeare.com/project/shrew-relationship/
The ghost scene… as Andee introduces it and rewrites it for today’s kids.
This is something unique and wonderful! At here is the YOU-Tube videos she has begun to put together, for this project.
Each episode of Global Hamlet is divided into three parts and released separately as 3-5 minute videos:
And For you teachers out there: At her site are many ways to engage kids while, for example, teaching punctuation or even iamabic pentameter!
(2) Shakespeare for Kids Theatre Games | How to Physicalize Iambic Pentameter | Global Hamlet – YouTube(2) Shakespeare for Kids
Theatre Games | How to Physicalize Shakespeare/Punctuation | Global Hamlet – YouTube
Back in Austin, ImproveED Shakespeare is now supported in part by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department.
Here is the Improved Shakespeare Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ImprovEdShakespeare/
Back in Austin, ImproveED Shakespeare is now supported in part by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department.
Wonderful Susan!!!