abilities-in short, boys and girls in need of special educational programs, services, facilities, or materials. There are an estimated seven million such school-age youngsters in the United States-some 10 or 12 percent of the overall school-age population - plus another million preschoolers. Particularly because of efforts undertaken during the current decade, major progress has been made in affording them educational opportunities commensurate with their needs. During the last five years the number of handicapped children receiving effective special education services has climbed from 2.1 million to nearly three million. That nevertheless leaves another three million or so who are receiving considerably less than an adequate education and one million who are denied access to a free public education altogether. Moreover, the figures alone do not indicate the depths of the handicapped children's dilemma. They are still more often than not categorized, almost as if they were something less than individual human beings; they bear a stigma. They are often separated from other children not infrequently at the instigation of parents and educators who see the possibility of difficulties or disruptions - a practice that is particularly corrosive for children whose handicaps are relatively minor. Civil rights actions have revealed many cases in which black, MexicanAmerican, and American Indian youngsters have been placed in classes for the retarded when their "problem" would appear simply to have been a different cultural background. timulated in part by the progress achieved during the past five years, a surge of activity is now under way toward strengthening special education in all its parts. More and more public schools, for example, are seeking to reach out to the severely or multiple handicapped child. There are programs to help the parents of handicapped children start the educative process during infancy. A search is on for better testing and evaluation procedures (particularly in relation to minority groups). There are programs to involve handicapped boys and girls more fully in career or vocational education. There are renewed efforts to serve the needs of the gifted and talented. In general, there is increasing interest in bringing exceptional youngsters into education's mainstream. While the word "mainstreaming" seems to have different meanings for different people and programs, its essence is the idea of providing special education to exceptional children while they attend regular classes. It should be noted, however, that some educators feel immediate total immersion in regular classes to be impractical for a significant portion of handicapped children and suggest instead what they call "progressive inclusion" - that is, starting off by including the handicapped child in selected classroom activities for limited spans of time and then moving forward from there. Behind such moves as these is a changing philosophy that is increasingly being spelled out in the law. The education of exceptional children is no longer perceived as a matter of charity or simply as wise practice initiated by an enlightened society determined to capitalize to the fullest on its human resources. The issue now is one of the handicapped child's rights as a citizen - the proposition that the public schools are as fully obligated to serve exceptional children as they are any others of school age. The courts have agreed, perhaps most strikingly in the landmark 1971 case of Pennsylvania Association for the Retarded v. the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which held that the public schools of that State could not ignore the educational needs of the mentally retarded (and by implication the needs of other exceptional children as well). By now at least 36 lawsuits have been filed in 25 States aimed at guaranteeing handicapped children their right to an education and bringing an end to State and local policies and practices that either exclude these children or provide them with an education that is clearly inappropriate. In all major instances in which decisions have been rendered, the courts have found for the plaintiffs. Special education is thus entering a new era, demonstrating as it does so that the principles commemorated in the Bicentennial observance remain vigorous. It is of course true that millions of handicapped youngsters are still effectively detoured from "the pursuit of happiness," but their number is dwindling. More and more are being offered truly equal educational opportunity, the right to achieve their potential and thereby make their individual contribution to the Nation's further progress. -WILLIAM C. GEER Executive Director The Council for Exceptional Children | THE ARTS cally, the arts have rarely come first in our schools, which had sterner tasks than pursuing the Muses. "To America one school master is worth a dozen poets," said Benjamin Franklin, "and the invention of a machine... is of more importance than a masterpiece of Raphael." John Adams made a more famous statement and its hopeful promise may yet be fulfilled. "I must study politics and war," he said, "that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. navigation, commerce and agriculture in Miss Hanks is Chairwoman for the National Endowment for the Arts. BY NANCY HANKS order to give their children a right to study As the Nation became fundamentally geared to help students bring home leaner bacon than their fathers had, whether the child was to be a "noble yeoman" of Thomas Jefferson's vision or a doctoral candidate in one of today's law, medical, scientific, or education schools. By popular if misguided definition, the arts were traditionally deemed less necessary, less American somehow, less manifestly predestined than mechanics, agriculture, technology, and the so-called professions. Certainly the arts came to be taught in the painting academies and music conservatories that grew in the 19th century. But these too were trade schools that isolated students in their own ivory towers and excluded outsiders. Nevertheless in the past 150 years drawing and singing have managed to move slowly, almost furtively into public schools. That the arts entered the schools at all is the near-miracle. Some highlights of how it happened deserve a swift review. Music in the schools had a brief heyday on this continent. The first European teacher was Brother Pedro de Cante, a Franciscan in Cortez's train. In 1523 he offered Indian children a curriculum modeled after the medieval cathedral schools. He taught reading and writing, of course, but stressed singing, the making and playing of instruments, and music manuscript copying. The Spanish mission system reached far into the present day United States as its patrons sought heathen souls to save and native gold to ship home. By 1540 Juan de Padilla, another Spanish missionary, was teaching music in what is now New Mexico, a cultural cul de sac far from what would become the turnpike of American development. In New England a full century later, religious motives were again the prime mover of education - but without musical accompaniment. The purpose of the writ ten Word was to point the way to salvation along a route that became increasingly narrow. In 1643 a Boston pamphleteer explained the colonists' rationale: After they had built houses and "convenient places for Gods worship and settled the Civill government; one of the next things we longed for, and looked after, was to advance Learning... dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches when our present Ministers shall lie in the dust." Fortunately, "It pleased God to stir up in the heart of one Mr. Harvard. to give the one halfe of his Estate towards the erecting of a College, and all of his Library" which comprised 320 books. After the Connecticut General Court endorsed Yale's founding, it stated, "One principal purpose in erecting this college was to supply the church in this colony with a learned, pious and orthodox ministry." In 1647 Massachusetts authorized the first publicly supported schools with a law requiring every town of more than 50 households to employ a reading and writing teacher. Many settlers balked at this extravagance and the schools were seasonal to the point of being sporadic as teachers - many of them ministerial candidates awaiting a vacant pulpit - rode circuits. nderstandably, given the fundamentalist standards of the day, artistic subjects were avoided like Satanic infections. Creative curriculums, in the modern sense, were unheard of in grammar schools with their hornbooks, rote methods, and hickory-enforced discipline. Portraiture was left to sign painters, who learned their art as apprentice tradesmen. Interest in music, accord ing to one scholar, "declined almost to the vanishing point" in insular 17th century America while Monteverdi, Scarlatti, and Purcell composed for European contemporaries. What music survived here was liturgical. The second book published in the Colonies was The Bay Psalm Book (1640), which set down David's song in metrical verses that could be sung to tunes the immigrants brought with them. In 1721 one of Franklin's brothers print ed a book with musical notation. About this time the "singing school" was be coming popular to improve church music. It was a social and religious adjunct, hardly an educational one. In 1833 the Boston Academy of Music was founded with the revolutionary purpose, among others, of encouraging music in the public schools. A few years later what we'd call a pilot project received charmingly breathless approval in a report to Boston's mayor. It read: "One thing has been made evident, that the musical ear is more common than has been generally supposed. There are but few in the school who make palpable dis cords when all are singing.... They prefer the play of a hard music lesson to any outof-door sports.... A song introduced in the middle of the session has been invariably followed by excellent effort. It is relief to the wearisomeness of constant study. It excites the listless and calms the turbulent and uneasy. It seems to renerve the mind and prepare all for more vigorous intellectual action." In 1836 Calvin E. Stowe reported to Ohio School authorities on European education trends. He said he observed in Germany "the universal success and very beneficial results with which the arts of drawing and designing and vocal and instrumental music, moral instruction and the Bible have been introduced into the schools." He met teachers who "had never seen a child that was capable of learning to read and write who could not be taught to sing well and draw neatly, and that, too, without taking any time which could at all interfere with, indeed which would not actually promote his progress in other subjects." (If Mr. Stowe anticipated John Dewey, he also proved that his wife, the former Harriet Beecher, had all the writing talent in the family.) The spread of music was slow. In 1860 Philadelphia overseers resolved that there should be a piano in every school. In 1865 New Haven's first music teacher was getting started in school hallways. He moaned "it was very difficult indeed to convince the authorities that ...musical instruction should be governed by the same rules and regulations that obtained in other subjects." (Then, as now, an innovator's first obstacle was the deportment department.) By 1886 the U.S. Commissioner of Education estimated that music was being taught regularly in less than 250 schools. Art was academically accepted even later, except in professional schools. Amos Bronson Alcott included drawing from nature for a half-hour a week in the 1830s. But his Temple School was closed because discussion of religious principles was part of the curriculum. Creative arts were still considered icing on the cake of aristocratic education at a time when most young people got an unleavened diet of practical training in schools. These subjects, as a critic observed, were only "accepted as a means of refining the taste and of giving, particularly to young ladies in private schools, the finishing touch of art to an education incomplete without a few lessons on the harp and a few others in sketching in pencil or sepia." The first public school drawing classes were promoted by Horace Mann, who published a series of lessons imported from Germany in his Common School Journal in 1844. Typically, the purpose was practical, not expressive. "Drawing is a form of writing," he wrote, “and should be taught with it." This art – the rendering of formal and tidy geometic forms - must have been sterile stuff. It wasn't ars gratia artis but early mechanical drawing, which had a high marketplace demand as New England's manufacturing capacity expanded with her industrial ambitions. |