Funding arts in the schools should not be thought of as optional

Opinion editor's note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes a mix of national and local commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

It was hardly a surprise to see the June 6 front-page article in the Star Tribune describing plans to cut funding for the arts in Minneapolis schools. It is an old story — arts are always the first to go when school boards confront budget challenges. After all, so the thinking goes, arts are "nice but not necessary" or "arts are a luxury we can't afford" or "art is for rich people."

You name it, we've heard it. Yet, none of the justifications for cutting arts funding — whether by local school boards or by Congress — ever make sense. After all, humans have been creating art for millennia — 64,000 years, actually, plus or minus a century or two.

Professional football, in contrast, has been around for about 120 years (since 1892, to be precise, when my great uncle, Walter "Pudge" Heffelfinger, became the first professional football player, according to the NFL Hall of Fame). Yet no stadium ever goes unbuilt. Just Google "Buffalo Bills" and you'll see.

While we seem to see the arts as fully optional, it is clear that early humans thought art was extremely important. If they didn't, they most certainly would not have wasted precious energy and resources creating elaborate, and stunning, cave paintings.

The urge to create is essentially human, and the drive that leads humans to create art is the same drive that has always driven humankind to new heights of creativity in a wide range of endeavors — better spearheads, better means of travel and communication, and astounding achievements in medicine and science. The brain surely does not silo creativity. I highly recommend Walter Isaacson's splendid biographies of Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein, both of which highlight the diverse and astounding power of the human mind to be creative across an array of disciplines and challenges.

It is in our best interests that art instruction be at the core of both primary and secondary education in our schools, just as science and math are. Field trips A to Z — art museums to zoos — can spark interest in many different fields and help students see the fruits of human creativity in the arts and sciences broadly.

Museums are extremely popular in our country: annual visitation is about 6.5 times the attendance at all regular season major league sports contests, yet museums struggle to find the funding that will bring more schoolchildren to their institutions.

The Twin Cities is one of the premier museum communities in the U.S., and it is in our best interests that every schoolchild, in every part of the state, be able to benefit from numerous opportunities to visit those museums throughout their primary and secondary school experiences. And it is in our best interests that all those students be able to enjoy and benefit from arts instruction as an essential, "uncuttable" part of their curricula.

We don't need less funding for arts and culture in our schools. We need more.

Ford Watson Bell, of Shoreview, is a retired president of the American Alliance of Museums in Washington, D.C.