Frank McCourt, the memoirist and legendary English teacher at New York’s Stuyvesant High School, was once challenged by a student who asked what possible use a particular work of literature would have in his life. “You will read it for the same reason your parents waste their money on your piano lessons,” McCourt replied tartly, “so you won’t be a boring little shite the rest of your life.” Perhaps schools should collect Boring Little Shite (BLS) data and report it alongside AYP and FRPM. Jay Greene seems to be working on it. A data hawk and acerbic defender of school choice and vouchers, Greene might have been voted least likely to give a damn about the arts before his surprising 2013 study linking field trips to art museums to a range of desirable outcomes, including critical thinking and empathy. He’s at it again in the current issue of Education Next with an interesting study on the effects of taking students to see live theatre, including improved grasp of the play, vocabulary, empathy, and tolerance. Greene and his co-authors make much of these enhancements over a control group who only read the plays or saw film versions. But the good effects aren’t entirely surprising. Attention is the first, most important key to learning. It stands to reason that the novel experience of attending a live performance will capture students’ attention of a play in a way that more familiar modes (watching a movie, reading) do not. Likewise, repeated exposure to vocabulary, not memorization, is the source of nearly all of our vocabulary growth. No surprise then that seeing a play—a kind of high-value read-aloud—cements words in students’ minds. And surely there’s a link between tolerance, empathy, and the flesh-and-blood representation of humanity on stage. The study, however, has some limitations. It measures relatively short-term gains; do the benefits—especially in tolerance and empathy—stick many months later? A more significant issue may be the “relative homogeneity of the students in [the] sample, with most being white and in advanced classes.” Perhaps other researchers will attempt to replicate the findings among low-income kids and among a wider variety of cultural experiences. Most interesting is Greene’s purpose in shifting his attention to the arts in the first place. “Our goal,” he writes, “is to broaden the types of measures that education researchers, and in turn policymakers and practitioners, consider when judging the educational success or failure of schools.” Hopefully that includes ensuring kids don’t become boring little shites.
SOURCE: Jay P. Greene, Collin Hitt, Anne Kraybill, and Cari A. Bogulski, “Learning from Live Theater,” Education Next, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Winter 2015).
