Fine Arts Argumentative Essay

What would the world look like if schools stopped teaching the fine arts? As the years have progressed, the funding for schools has started to deplete. With the depletion of money in the schools, this led to many teachers losing their jobs and many programs being severely underfunded or even being cut. States such as Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Arizona have struggled with having decent teacher pay and proper funding for their classrooms. This leaves the students with improper tools to be able to learn with inside of their classrooms. While all the schools are being affected by budget cuts, the program that is being hit the hardest is the fine arts program, specifically music. These programs are having to find their own ways to be able to fund

Over the past few years, many people have started to wonder my music education has been on the decline in schools. Susan J. Bodilly answers this in her book The Evolving Ecology of Arts Education. In this book, she makes a statement that because of the financial issues that schools have faced during the 1970s and 1980s in the United States of America has, “The arts and arts teachers became easy targets for budget cutting” (Bodilly 10). Bodilly expands on this by saying that high population cities such as New York City have had to lay-off more than a quarter of their education staff by the mid-70s. The Center for Arts Education (CAE) then filed a report that said that a large portion of schools no longer have a licensed art educator. Bodilly’s response to this is that “Schools

In her journal article “Music Education Budget Crisis” in the Music Educators Journal, she talks about how many of the problems seen in the 70s and 80s are still occurring in the twenty-first century. Slaton states that “… many governments have decided to make major sacrifices in education” (33). Because the local, state, and federal governments have started to reduce funding for the schools, that has led to the school administration overseeing which programs to reduce funding in so their students can still receive an education. Slaton’s response to this stated, “Many are choosing to let go of or reduce funding for their fine arts programs and music education in particular” (33). To support her points that she is making, Slaton references the opposition in her article. She mentions how the fine arts, typically band programs, can be quite expensive to maintain. Some of the opposition believes that the money going into music can be best used somewhere else that they feel is more useful (Slaton 34). Most former, current, and future music educators would disagree with the idea of music not being a productive source within the public-school system and higher education. On the other hand, they also recognize that funding a music program is quite expensive, and this typically leads to finding alternate solutions to fund