A push to bring back arts in schools

Art museums know it. So do orchestras. Little theater companies, too.

Nearly every arts organization can trace malaise and marginalization to a lack of arts education in schools. Several generations now have made it to adulthood never having been challenged to figure out what's going on in Picasso's

Guernica

, where the "Enigma" is in Elgar, whether the life path of George Gibbs and Emily Webb in

Our Town

is rote or meaningful - and why all these things should be urgent and important to anyone moving through the world today.

What this dearth of arts education has meant to our ability to function as a cohesive, harmonious society is one broad issue.

But a more specific one is what it has meant to the 120 arts leaders who gathered this month at the National Constitution Center: a dangerous deficit of engagement, which has led to dwindling audiences, a smaller pool of talented board members from which to recruit, a shrunken donor base, and a creeping feeling of institutional irrelevance.

People just don't wake up one morning at the age of 40 with a burning desire to go to hear the orchestra, or to collect (and someday donate) a cache of Jasper Johns.

Someone finally is taking on the job of returning arts education to Philadelphia children. The William Penn Foundation convened these leaders to begin what promises to be one of the most important initiatives in the city's history. It will be an expensive and possibly politically fraught process. But there seems to be an acknowledgment that the little fixes (better marketing, cheaper seats, more populist repertoire) are no longer working. The time has come to think long term, difficult as it may be.

No one knows what form the solution will take, but the process is going forward confidently with a series of workshops and discussions. William Penn hopes to have a blueprint for a program within six to nine months. Presumably, though it hasn't said so, the foundation will also put its money behind the idea. Whether it comes in the size of one of its usual grants, or on the extraordinary scale of its 1996 gift to Fairmount Park ($26.4 million), remains to be seen.

How much would it cost to put a high-quality, sustained arts experience into the life of every school-age child in Philadelphia? Too much, of course. With schools already scraping to provide even the basics, how can anyone hope to add the expense of art teachers and visiting orchestras? What people tend to forget, however, is that almost every Philadelphia arts institution already serves school-age children, and that those programs can and should be integrated into whatever new program Philadelphia creates.

That was one of the key messages from Gigi Antoni, executive director of Big Thought, a Dallas learning collaborative, when she kicked off this recent arts confab. Big Thought is a big operation, bringing arts to 400,000 children and adults in Dallas annually. It is widely regarded as a model for how an outside group can work with a public school system in establishing an arts curriculum - sustained, weekly instruction in art and music for every child.

What relevance does a Sun Belt-city school system filled with children of oil tycoons have to Philadelphia? Actually, in Dallas, children of oil tycoons go to private schools, just as in another city we know. The rest of the student population is largely poor and overwhelmingly African American and Hispanic.

And, as Antoni pointed out, Philadelphia has an asset Dallas lacks: a large number of downtown and near-downtown colleges and universities. Since one of Big Thought's ideas is to enhance, not replace, people and programs already in place, this can only be a huge advantage.

In opening remarks, William Penn president Feather O. Houstoun used her moment at the podium to prod this gathering of Philadelphia's art leaders (which included everyone from orchestra president James Undercofler to nonprofit veteran Marciene S. Mattleman) about the city's tendency to "work in separate rooms" - a polite way of saying that people here protect their turf.

If you think about the culture of culture, the prime dynamic at work is often about competing for money from the same small group of donors. Carole Haas Gravagno, a local philanthropist who tends to give with her heart, must go to bed with an advanced case of donor fatigue some nights.

The success of this idea hinges on the Philadelphia cultural community's flexing a muscle it doesn't use much - the one that stretches beyond self-interest to achieve something bigger. Think of it as a test. Our arts community has before it the rare chance to bring something into the private lives of children that, if done well, will bloom into something for the public good later in life.