REAL ART RERUN
NOTES FROM ONE OF AMERICA'S MAJOR IDEOLOGICAL FRONTS:
Public Education, Theater, Black History Month, and Paul Robeson

This Real Art Rerun was originally posted February 22, 2003.

This May, I will have completed five years as a public high school teacher. One extremely important observation that I made about American education during my first month of teaching is that public schools are far, far more political than I could ever have imagined--like government and the news media, public education is a major American ideological battleground. For the most part, I've kept my leftist mouth shut when talking to other teachers (I'm in a Texas conservative hell district) and have been very careful about what I say to students (but I do talk about my beliefs to my students).

Last Thursdsay, in a ritual repeated yearly, the ten or fifteen theater arts teachers of our district met to discuss the state of theater education. Typically, teachers complain that faculty and administrators don't take theater seriously as an academic subject--students are regularly pulled out of theater classes to do extra work in other more traditional, academic classes; generally, teachers in Texas are obsessed with getting their students to pass Bush's "standards" oriented tests and not many of them seem to understand how studying the theater has anything to do with that. So, many teachers in our district see theater education as useless fluff.

Many of the same theater arts teachers at these meetings who complain about not being taken seriously also usually boast of all their shows and productions that, in my humble opinion, are so much useless fluff. That is to say, it seems that most of the theater teachers in my district have a sort of 1930s Mickey Rooney, Our Gang "let's do a show" approach to theater education that does nothing but prove to their detractors that theater education is pointless. At past meetings, I have tried to point out this paradox and that maybe we ought to approach theater more intellectually--I am usually quickly dismissed as an arts "snob," a serious artiste who just doesn't understand the community: "that's not what they want around here; that's not what makes them happy."

This year, I was more assertive. Once again, I pointed out the paradox: "don't you see, you're playing to their bias." Once again, I was called a snob. For the first time, I shot back: "I'm pretty far to the left both politically and philosophically and I believe that elitism of any sort is unethical and wrong." Three teachers burst out into near hysterical guffaws of laughter; this really cracked them up. While they were still laughing, I said calmly, "I'm actually serious. I really mean it. This isn't about snobbery; snobbery is wrong."

The district fine arts coordinator also misunderstood, but in a more respectful way--he thought I was railing away about the nature and bureaucracy of public education. "No," I said, "I've been in this business long enough to understand how things work. I'm talking about what we teach in the classroom. I'm saying that theater is, in fact, a hard academic subject that is studied at many universities all the way up to the doctoral level." Finally, I think I had gotten everybody's attention.

I went on. "I think the best way to illustrate how we can do this at our level is to give you the rundown on my Black History Month unit on Paul Robeson." Very quickly (in order to amaze with a veritable deluge of information), in my old high school debating style, I then proceeded to give them the basics:

In order to contextualize my approach to theater education, I need to say, as I say at the beginning of the year to all my theater arts students, that theater is a four thousand year old tradition that comes from the culture that practically founded western civilization, the ancient Greeks. Indeed, the Greeks were among the very first in the west to formally study philosophy, math, physics, astronomy, geometry, and democracy. They made lasting contributions to architecture, sculpture, the study of history, and poetry. To the Greeks it was all the same thing: the pursuit of knowledge and understanding. Indeed, Aristotle, who taught Alexander the Great, was a major expert on literature, poetry, theater, metaphysics (spirituality), physics (science), and philosophy; Aristotle, who has been studied throughout the ages, is still taken very seriously by scholars today. This is where I am coming from when studying and teaching the theater. Theater is, ideally, the study of everything, the study of the human condition, of human relationships both individually and collectively.

This is also the approach that one should take when studying the great actor, Paul Robeson. If we're going to talk about Robeson, then we have to hit the Harlem Renaissance. That means talking about James Baldwin's experience there as a youngster, talking about Langston Hughes, about Duke Ellington. If we're going to talk about Robeson, then we have to talk about his definitive work as "Othello" and the value of Shakespeare who, as Robeson said, "foresaw the problem of a black man living in a white society." We have to talk about his other great roles such as Brutus Jones in Eugene O'Neill's "The Emperor Jones." We have to talk about Robeson's career long tinkering with the lyrics to the song written for him to sing in "Showboat," "Ol' Man River" such that the racist song of black despair eventually became a song of black triumph and defiance. We have to talk about his pioneering civil rights activism that took place well before the modern civil rights era had begun, activism that ultimately resulted in his blacklisting during the McCarthy era. If we talk about blacklisting, we have to hit the Cold War and the great ideological divide of the twentieth century, communism versus capitalism; we also have to talk about free speech and what it means to the American political system.

This is how we should sell theater arts to administrators, faculty, and to the community, not as "let's do a show," but as one of the most important classes a child can ever take.

That sure did shut up everybody. After a brief silence, the fine arts coordinator gave the floor to another teacher with another topic. When introducing her topic she said that she was going to "rant" about something else.

"Oh you think I was ranting, do you?" I asked.

"Yes, you were ranting." she replied.

But I think I had made my point because nobody had a real response. Unfortunately, I fear that, in the end, I will simply be ignored. Theater arts in my school district will, in all probability be business as usual for the foreseeable future. But then, that's exactly what public education is supposed to be, isn't it? Business as usual: indoctrinating children into the culture of authority and obedience. True education, true thought runs counter to that agenda.


Paul Robeson

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