How Bernie Madoff makes a case for arts education

There’s a great article in this week’s New Yorker about Bernie Madoff and the original schemer, Charles Ponzi, from which Madoff’s new nomenclature is taken. Writer Ron Chernow says this about Charles Ponzi:

Ponzi was convinced that he was a wizard who had stumbled upon a form of financial alchemy that had eluded others. Incapable of moral clarity, he could never quite admit to himself that he was a charlatan and that his scheme was an impossible fiasco.

The idea of being “incapable of moral clarity” struck me as I read this article. Ponzi’s inability to understand his actions and their consequences resonates throughout the article. He appeared to have no understanding of the impact of his immoral actions on others. This reminded me of a great book called Moral Imagination by Mark Johnson. Johnson says that the moral imagination is “an ability to imaginatively discern various possibilities for acting in a given situation and to envision the potential help and harm that are likely to result from a given action." In other words, the moral imagination is to imagine what effects we might cause with our actions. How do our actions affect others and what might their experience of our actions be? This moral role-taking, if you will, is a sophisticated ability. It obviously isn’t innate (see various felons listed above) but is a learned behavior. So where can it be learned?

Why, look! We’re back to the arts. The arts in general and I will argue the theatre in particular is all about this role- or perspective-taking. Through theatre we explore experiences outside our own – experiences we have no access to in our own lives. But through learning in theatre our ability to use our imaginations “to discern various possibilities” is front and center. Ideally, we put ourselves aside and imagine what is to be someone else.

The moral imagination is not limited to perspective-taking. When children learn in theatre, it is also an opportunity to develop an understanding of actions and outcomes. How many of us wish that our children had a better understanding of the consequences of their actions (all parents with teenagers can raise their hands)? When we read a play or "do" a play or see a play, we reflect on both the actions and the outcomes. We are forced to consider the consequences. Think of how Lear rages at his daughters with disasterous consequences.

By educating our children in the theatre in particular and the arts in general, we offer them these extraordinary skills – to understand another person’s point of view and to reflect on possible consequences. Imagine what today’s headlines might be if we had taken these skills more seriously. For one, Madoff might have run a legitimate business rather than bilking thousands of investors. For another, the implosion of the credit market might have been averted with more ethical lending practices to homeowners who clearly could not afford the debt they were accumulating.

We want to prepare our kids for the world they will live in. We don’t know what that will entail but we can probably assume that fraud will be part of it. Charles Ponzi began his scheming in 1919. Ninety years later Bernie Madoff nearly perfected the scheme. Perhaps we can offer our children something better than a nearly perfect Ponzi scheme. Perhaps, through thoughtful education that includes the arts, we can prepare our children for their world with a robust moral imagination. I’m all for that.

News Flash: Arts cut from schools

The San Diego school board has issued a Plan A of budgets cuts and has a Plan B in place, which includes eliminating the visual and performing arts across the second largest school district in the state of California. The arts are currently the only curricular area to be cut under Plan B. There is a discussion amongst my circle of colleagues about the ethical nature of cutting the arts. So, here are some thoughts on ethics and the elimination of arts education from public schools.

In both ethics and the law, we create sets of rules (at least in western ethics and since this is the United States, western ethics rule, if you will excuse the pun). I quoted Frank Griswold earlier about ethics being the sets of rules we agree to live by once we decide to live together. Once we set up those rules, we don’t get to break them because it is more convenient to do so. Convenience is not a reason to compromise on our core beliefs.

This extends, of course, to how we educate our kids. We have created essentially a set of rules (in the form of No Child Left Behind) that we have agreed will guide the education of our children. This is part of our ethical obligation to our children. We – America the country, not just American parents - have an ethical responsibility to educate children. In meeting that ethical responsibility we created NCLB (I have no doubt this could be argued about how successfully we met that responsibility through this piece of legislation).

As those of us in the trenches know, the arts are mandated in No Child Left Behind as the part of the curriculum. So in deciding to exclude the arts from the curriculum is in violation of our original agreement about what a child in a public school should expect to receive.

I realize that NCLB is not perfect and I also realize that it is not equitably applied due to high-stakes testing. If we agree as a society that NCLB is not meeting the needs of our children we have an ethical obligation to rewrite it, rework it or throw it out and start again. Nonetheless, we are currently violating our ethical duties by allowing American children to receive less than what we agreed they needed.

Our second ethical failing in considering the arts education cuts is that we are allowing public education to promote a form of illiteracy. By failing to teach our children the arts from the time they enter school through the completion of their high school diploma, we fail to prepare them appropriately for the world they are about to enter. We are promoting a form of illiteracy. This illiteracy translates into fewer skills and less knowledge to solve more complicated problems than previous generations.

How can we rationalize this? We cannot and we should not. One of the great philosophical thinkers, Immanuel Kant, recognized the danger in rationalization and the driving need of humans to do so. Rationalization allows us to excuse ourselves from our ethical responsibilities and we must be careful in this regard. Our rationalization of the elimination of school curriculum teaches our children a number of things – and none of them are good.

Yo-Yo Ma and Ethical Obligations

In Howard Gardner’s most recent book, Five Minds for the Future, Gardner considers what we will need for the future. He has five minds – the disciplined mind, the synthesizing mind, the creating mind, the respectful mind and the ethical mind. Much of Gardner’s writing on the ethical mind is from a previous book of his, Good Work, which I found to be a fascinating read.
In Five Minds, Gardner reflects on a conversation with Yo-Yo Ma. Ma presents three duties, if you will, for musicians. It suggests a simple yet persuasive personal code of ethics. Here’s what Gardner wrote about Ma.

In June 2005, I asked the cellist Yo-Yo Ma what he considered to be good work in his role as a leading musical performer. Based on much previous reflection, Ma outlined three distinct obligations: (1) to perform the repertoire as excellently as possible; (2) to be able to work together with other musicians, particularly under conditions where one has to proceed rapidly, and develop the necessary common understandings and trust: and (3) to pass on one’s knowledge, skills, understanding and orientation to succeeding generations, so that music he cherishes can endure. (pg 151).

I admire this very much because it is clear and yet encompassing. The first obligation is quite inspirational and encourages one to work at the top of their game and pursue excellence. This has real possibility for us in arts education. What if we all shared a value for ourselves and our students to perform or create as excellently as possible? Our accomplishment of excellence would of course vary greatly but isn’t the effort to reach towards excellence an important ethical attribute?

The second emphasizes the collaborative nature of performance. It does not guide us in how we should specifically behave towards other musicians (i.e. respectfully) but perhaps that is not the point. The third obligation particularly resonates in that it relates not only to future musicians but also to future musical audiences and appreciators.

I also like how these three obligations broaden in scope as you progress through them. The first is quite personal about the relationship between musician and music. The second obligation opens up the lens and considers other musicians, who may vary over the course of a career. The last obligation is very large in its consideration of the future and the larger society. Lovely.

Online Resources for Ethics and Arts Education (#2)

Two more examples today of codes of ethics in arts education.

The first is from Iowa State’s Theatre Dept http://www.theatre.iastate.edu/aboutus.shtml). I like this first one for a couple of reasons. It is short and succinct yet it does elaborate on their core values so we can understand what they mean. It addresses faculty and staff specifically (I think you can be trapped in trying to address a code of ethics to too diverse an audience). What I most appreciate about this code is that (from an outsider’s perspective) it appears to reflect who they are. It is not boiler plate but it appears to be unique unto them. From reading this code, I have a sense of their departmental culture as well as well as their ethical guidelines. I believe that is important. Our code of ethics is a way to tell others - and remind ourselves - who we are and what we believe. Interestingly, my graduate students from last fall were not as positive as I am about this (they thought it was too touchy-feely). There you go. Ethics can be difficult to agree on.

My thanks to Maureen A. Gelchion at the Astoria Dance Centre for this reference. The Dance Educators of America has a code of ethics (available on their website at www.deadance.com under “Membership”). It has some similarity with the Music Educators of America code.