Dear friend of Hollywood Arts,
For the past few months, I've been watching
our elected leaders deliberate over how to
fix the city of Los Angeles. With the highest
number of foster care young people in the
country and the recent upsurge in gang
killings and hate-based crimes at
schools, City Council has turned to raising
taxes in order to add more police and hire a
Gang Czar to the tune of millions. What is
interesting to me is that nowhere in this
approach is there actual proof that these
tactics will change the landscape of Los
Angeles for the better.
Instead, we will be taxed more heavily and
young people will continue to struggle with
their anger, use violence as a means to
combat boredom, drugs to manage self-hatred,
and grow up in neighborhoods where setting
fire to trees is an acceptable recreational
activity. Most will look into a future that
seems very similar to their present. They
will see their future in poverty--stuck in
dead-end jobs; blighted, crime-filled
neighborhoods; periods of homelessness and a
life without choices.
Will more police break a cycle that continues
to push kids into a world in which they are
unprepared and unwanted? In which their only
choice is to rage against odds that are
stacked against them? Research tells me that
reactive solutions, like adding more police,
infrequently cause the kind of systemic
change that proactive
approaches bring about. Research also tells
me that by not including the arts as part of
public policy reform we are missing an
opportunity to use the same creative problem
solving that arts-based learning develops in
individuals.
Why do we ignore the arts when we are looking
for solutions to the greatest challenges
affecting our communities? Isn't it time to
undo the biases of the past and to look at
more recent understandings of the mind and
human development? We covet the sciences as
if anything but math-based learning will lead
to failed individuals who cannot contribute
to our social and economic vitality; yet year
after year our schools produce drop-outs or
young people who contribute little beyond
fear and hatred to their communities.
New
studies reveal that arts-based education
develops habits of mind or thinking skills
that help individuals become
independent learners, conscience of their
environment and communities, and better able
to contribute to a new economy that is rooted
in the creative industries.
We at Hollywood Arts prefer to be on the
proactive side. We set up a little experiment
called "free art school" for over 18,
homeless young people.
We wrote
curricula
based on new understandings of
intelligence
as:
- Modifiable
- Capable of development throughout life
- Matured through active, arts-based
learning
We hired an educational
consultant
from UCLA and started to train our teachers
to teach our students how to observe, how to
express, how to problem solve and how to
generate new ideas. Yes, in the arts, but
wouldn't we like to see these thinking skills
in individuals working in all our industries?
We'd like to propose that instead of raising
taxes and adding new layers of bureaucracy on
to existing problems, we challenge the
problem at its core. We help individuals to
have choices through education and not the
same public school education we've been
relying on for decades, but education that
creates learning opportunities to develop the
thinking skills that even scientists need.
Its been an amazing year for Hollywood Arts.
We've met untold numbers of young people who,
without help, will end up on welfare. It's
also been a challenging year, as we too have
watched unemployment soar, gas prices rise
and people lose their homes. But we are in
for the long run--we believe that our
little experimental school will be a much
more cost-friendly investment for Los Angeles
when the alternatives are considered on both our
pocketbooks and our communities.
Please sit back and enjoy a 5 minute clip of
our last student performance: Let's Get
Loud
or listen to Deon Kohl, a 23 year old foster
care runaway,
talk about his experiences in our school or
check out photographs of Jesse Carmichael,
from the Grammy Award winning band Maroon 5,
teaching piano to our students.
