Dear Doctor:
Our school budget missed by two hundred votes, and that means that there will be some mandatory retraction of some of the special extracurricular activities that add flavor to our kids’ educations. Oh, I don’t think the football team will be canceling any games, but look for the music, art, theater and humanities programs to be rolled back.
In a related story, my blushing bride and I just returned this morning from a second honeymoon in Europe – in between London, where hip was born, and Amsterdam, where it currently resides, we actually had the best time in, of all places, Vienna.
I wasn’t even sure why Regina wanted to go to Vienna – seemed like a stuffy place where you listen to classical music and eat pastry. It turned out to be a magical fantasy world of a day gone by, complete with world class ballet, delightful music of all kinds and the best food and desserts – but first, we were swept away in the great respect and admiration for the artistic giants of yesteryear, from Mozart and Strauss to the art museums, the architecture, and the sheer elegance of the people and the environment.
This is the sacrifice we make when we don’t pass our school budgets – the first things to be deleted or compromised are these types of supposedly peripheral studies, those less important somehow than computer science or math, but the absence of which risks sterilizing and homogenizing education as to be creatively devoid of character.
I never before realized how, from simply standing in front of Buckingham Palace for the Changing of the Guard, or seeing Nureyev himself step out onto the stage at the State Opera House to accept congratulations for choreographing the final performance of the ballet season, or looking into Rembrandt’s or Rubens’ eyes in their self portraits, or experiencing the Vienna Mozart Orchestra in full period costumes and wigs, or being jolted by the jagged juxtaposition of the modern and the traditional in the Netherlands, it was all imprinting wildly in our minds, enriching our internal maps and broadening us, widening us as people, and as citizens of the world.
You wouldn’t think that school budgets would pave the way for that for our children – but they do. Please, read to your kids, and take them with you sometimes when you travel, and for goodness sake, expect them to learn something in school of cultural significance – it will come back to reward them in the form of a richer appreciation for the world in which they live, and the glorious histories of our species’ accomplishments over time.
Dennis Perman DC, for The Masters Circle
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