In a border society, art represents the safe channel of cultural exchange. A number of scholars have mapped these characteristics of border life, but I would assert that the most distinctive legacy of our diverse democratic heritage is a border society. Art is at the center. Culture to culture. Musical theater is opera colliding with vaudeville.
Film is drama on stage colliding with technology.
So, our argument must first advance a model, a metaphor, for art in democracy, and must also assert the place of art in addressing societal needs. It's the arts that equip our children with the skills necessary to speak, interpret, and create in this new language of the 21st century. A language that engages layers of sound, text, music and moving images, photographs and spoken voices, layered and blended at a blinding pace. Our children must navigate, decode and create in this digital age, and nothing confers this new literacy better and more completely than do music, painting, drama, and dance. The unique role that music and the other arts play in developing these four proficiencies places arts literacy alongside the fact-based and numeric literacies that have dominated our schools for the last fifty years.