Author: Gove, Richard

Publication Year: 1974

Media Type: Report

Summary:

The occasion was a conference, officially titled - in a way that was to provoke much comment, and even inspire a song - the National Conference on the Arts and Humanities/Gifted and Talented. Sponsored by Region VIII of the US Office of Education and the South Dakota Division of Elementary and Secondary Education, it was billed as a potpourri of demonstration, workshops, and presentation and the program featured an interesting mixture of well known writers, artists, educators, government officials and musicians.

Abstract:

The occasion was a conference, officially titled - in a way that was to provoke much comment, and even inspire a song - the National Conference on the Arts and Humanities/Gifted and Talented. Sponsored by Region VIII of the US Office of Education and the South Dakota Division of Elementary and Secondary Education, it was billed as a potpourri of demonstration, workshops, and presentation and the program featured an interesting mixture of well known writers, artists, educators, government officials and musicians.

Education in the arts and humanities and the identification and educational nurture of the gifted are both problems that are neither new nor unexamined and these topics had been considered separately by earlier conferences. But this was the first national conference to bring the two together, and it was a conjunction that struck off sparks. For one thing, the time was right. By now the dust had settled following that tremendous burst of activity in the late 1960's when widespread educational experimentation and research took place with the massive support of federal education laws. One could now begin to discern the outline of a pattern of experience and of attitudinal change. And several second generation models, building upon the experience of the 1960's, had now attained sufficient maturity to make possible substantial progress reports.

The conference was organized around four questions that held more than enough challenge to promise intellectual excitement and substance:

1. How can arts and humanities become a more central and invigorating part of the regular curriculum in public schools and universities?
   
   
2. How can we raise the awareness level to a point of intervention in meeting the needs of the gifted and talented citizens of our community?
   
   
3. What are the change agent skills necessary to convert schools into institutions where the arts and creative thinking are encouraged and enhanced rather than thwarted and rejected?
   
   
4. What can you as a conferee do at your level of influence to promote the three changes as listed above?

Though slightly blurred with jargon, the questions were plain enough. They dealt with subjects of more than specialized academic interest, matters of concern to all of us; a national resource of incalculable dimensions and the cultural climate in which we all live. (p. 1)

CONTENTS
Acknowledgements.
Conference personnel.
Foreword.
A temporary community.
The arts and the gifted: a stereoscopic view.
What's to be done?

Presentation: The transformation of the schools by Harold Taylor.
Presentation: Humanizing the humanizers by Murry Sidlin.
Presentation: Jazz and the schools by Nat Hentoff.
Presentation: The arts and humanities - what is most human by Virginia Y. Trotter.

Appendix A. Program.
Appendix B. Workshop leaders.
Appendix C. Speakers.
Appendix D. Government representatives.
Appendix E. Workshop coordinators.

Arts & Intersections:

Categories: Arts Education