Drawing on the Past for Insight and Direction: Ten Considerations in Legislative and Policy Development for Art Education

In early-June 1869, a coalition of 12 individuals and two businesses presented the Massachusetts state legislature with a carefully crafted petition. This document called for lawmakers to take action in requesting that the State Board of Education develop a plan to initiate drawing instruction in Massachusetts public schools, or to establish educational institutions for teaching this subject of study in the larger municipalities of the state. This petition read, as follows:To the honorable General Court of the State of Massachusetts.Your petitioners respectfully represent that every branch of manufactures in which the citizens of Massachusetts are engaged, requires, in the details of the processes connected with it, some knowledge of drawing and other arts of design on the part of the skilled workmen engaged.At the present time no wide provision is made for instruction in drawing in the public schools.Our manufacturers therefore compete under disadvantages with the manufacturers of Europe; for in all the manufacturing countries of Europe free provision is made for instructing workmen of all classes in drawing. At this time, almost all the best draughtsmen in our shops are men thus trained abroad.In England, within the last ten years, very large additions have been made to the provisions, which were before very generous, for free public instruction of workmen in drawing. Your petitioners are assured that boys and girls, by the time they are sixteen years of age, acquire great proficiency in mechanical drawing and in other arts of design.We are also assured that men and women who have been long engaged in the processes of manufacture, learn readily and with pleasure, enough of the arts of design to assist them materially in their work.For such reasons we ask that the Board of Education may be directed to report, in detail, to the next general court, some definite plan for introducing schools for drawing, or instruction in drawing, free to all men, women and children, in all towns of the Commonwealth of more than five thousand inhabitants.And your petitioners will ever pray.JACOB BIGELOW.J. THOS. STEVENSON.WILLIAMA. BURKE.JAMES LAWRENCE.EDW. E. HALE.THEODORE LYMAN.JORDAN, MARSH & CO.JOHN AMORY LOWELL.E.B. BIGELOW.FRANCIS C. LOWELL.JOHN H. CLIFFORD.WM. GRAY.F.H. PEABODY.A.A. LAWRENCE & CO.BOSTON, June, 1869. (Thirty-fourth Annual Report, 1871, pp. 163-164)The action of these 14 signatories appears to have been a first-of-itskind lobbying effort by a special interest group directed toward a state legislature on behalf of visual arts education in the United States. Numerous historical writings in art education have addressed the lawmakers' response to this petition, which eventually led to passage of the Massachusetts Drawing Act in the following year, the first mandated statewide public school drawing legislation enacted in the United States (e.g., Bolin, 1990, 1995; Efland, 1990; Green, 1948; Korzenik, 1985).A number of historians have examined various outcomes of this petition, yet little focus has been directed toward considering the political approach these 14 signatories took in crafting this document and submitting it to state lawmakers. What insights and possible policy development strategies might be gained for consideration today from examining the process these signatories undertook through lobbying the Massachusetts state legislature in their efforts to promote drawing education within the public schools of that state? This question becomes the focus of study for this investigation.Response to the Drawing Education Petition by Massachusetts LawmakersWithin days of the submission of the petition to the Massachusetts legislature, lawmakers responded favorably to it (Bolin, 1997), taking action through initiating the following legislative Resolve:1RESOLVE RELATING TO PROVISION FOR FREE INSTRUCTION IN MECHANICAL DRAWING IN THE CITIES AND LARGE TOWNS OF THE COMMONWEALTH. …