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Keeping your community covered. We're committed to producing high-quality, fact-based news and information that gives you the facts in this community we call home. If our work has helped you stay informed, take action, or feel more connected to Windham County – please give now to help us reach our goal of raising $150,000 by December 31st.
At a public forum on Arts in the Schools, held on May 4 at the Academy School, a broad cross-section of Brattleboro residents spoke eloquently about the importance of the arts in education, in community, and in the maintenance of a healthy society.
As the No Child Left Behind Act puts increasing pressure on schools to focus on the subjects tested on a massive scale - math and literacy - the Brattleboro School Board and members of the community, ranging from students, to teachers, to parents, to community organizers, and to well-known artists and performers, reaffirmed a commitment to keeping the arts strong in the curriculum during the school day so that all students might have access.
One member of the audience, a teacher for 26 years, spoke of the centrality of the arts to our democracy and our national interest, referring to President John F. Kennedy's well-known statement: “I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.”
President Kennedy's words also remind us that “[t]he problems of the real world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by obvious realities. We need men and women who can dream of things that never were.”...
