EDITH
KUl~ZWEIL
463
Ernest Boyer, the last of the keynote speakers, currently President of
the Carnegie Foundation and for years one of the country's foremost
educators, demonstrated how the arts might help us reach our lost chil–
dren, our undereducated and wayward youth. His impassioned and up–
beat address zeroed in on what this conference was all about, namely to
recognize that "we need the arts to express feelings and ideas that words
cannot convey" - via writing, music, painting, etc. Children, he went on
to elaborate via superb examples, learn to think not on ly in linear fash–
ion, but intuitively and creatively, and the arts alone "can knit it all to–
gether"; they can motivate children who are socially alienated; and they
are the bridges that can bring us together.
"The arts are a skill and not a frill in the twenty-first century" began
Terry Peterson, Special Counselor to the Secretary of the U.S.
Department of Education, and argued they are crucial in our concerted
efforts to redesign and reshape our schools, in our reach for higher stan–
dards. Elaborating on Boyers's address, he urged us
to
change programs
that have not worked, to advance and improve education at all levels,
and to take advantage of the unique opportunity of moving the arts
into the schools. Plato Karafelis, an elementary school principal advo–
cated teaching for "meaning and understanding," a change in paradigm
for artists' residencies and the app li cation of new technologies; and
Edward Gero, an actor and director reiterated all these points, adding
however that we now "have a window of opportunity to forge new al–
liances."
Still , I had a gnawing sense of despair when I kept listening to
speaker after speaker recommending participation and outreach - with–
out ever mcntioning where all the high goals, and the morals and va lues
we are reaching for, would come from. How would the excellence
some speakers kept mouthing emerge from what seemed to be both a
wish list of privileged victims, and a focus on the arts as shock troops?
My anguish was voiced by a woman who directs a literary program, and
who pointed out that literature and writers had been left out of our de–
liberations, that we must recognize that language and poetry arc central
to creativity. I fclt even more hopeless when a panelist advised her to ask
for funds from the National Coun cil for Teachers of English, and no
one in the audience took offense or came to her defense. When I finally
did, at the end of this last breakout session, I expected to be booed but,
instead, was applauded - probably because I said that I was both a pro–
fessor and editor of
Parfisal1 Review
and thus had to remind the partici–
pants that fiction writing is an art, and that actors need playwrights who
have a superior command of the nuances of our language. I also opposed
the need for yet another formal pressure group for people whose lives
