A Side by Side with "U.S. Crisis: Art, Education and Society"

Art: "Simply put, when aesthetic purpose precedes exposure and sales, art plays the upper hand. When reversed, it's about entertainment. All the high priced creative talent in the world invested in a product formulated to perform in the marketplace does not add up to a lone artist maintaining the integrity of a single well conceived idea....The point is not the amount of money or labor that is invested, it's the nature of the engagement by both the artist and audience." – Bill Lazaro, Publisher, ArtScene (posted on Huffinton Post, July 26, 2010, Art Versus Entertainment: The Gap is Essential)

Education:  The Huffington Post reported on March 22, 2003, that according to "What Kids Are Reading: The Book-Reading Habits of Students in American Students,"  conducted by Renaissance Learning, Inc., that American high school students are reading material geared for fifth and sixth graders. "Only 34% of students were rated reading proficient."

Society:  Our democratic election process is dysfunctional and replete with graft. We have huge money machines supporting candidates that, if elected, will be in the position of power to do the will of the money machines. With the right to vote, most eligible voters don't participate. Many who do vote are ignorant of various candidates' philosophies. Most cannot decipher the language of the various referenda on the ballot and punch Yay or Nay anyway.  What might the "Founding Fathers" think of what has become of the ideals they held?

 "Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money to be defeated."– Will Rogers

Political candidates (on both sides of the aisle), like vultures, feed upon the poor disenfranchised people in big cities by having the candidates' workers walk around with money in their pockets. They distribute this money to prospective voters in exchange for the voters' agreement to vote for the candidates represented by the stooges. Money wins by purchasing votes.

I couldn't help but compare this U.S. crisis of politics with Upton Sinclair's description of Chicago in the early 20th century.  

From The Jungle (Upton Sinclair):  "...the (leader) took Jurgis and the rest of his flock into the back room of a saloon, and showed each of them where and how to mark a ballot, and then gave each two dollars, and took them to the polling place, where there was a policeman on duty especially to see that they got through all right. Jurgis felt quite proud of this good luck till he got home and met Jonas, who had taken the leader aside and whispered to him, offering to vote three times for four dollars, which offer had been accepted....(Jurgis) learned that America differed from Russia in that its government existed under the form of democracy. The officials who ruled it, and got all the graft, had to be elected first; and so there were two rival sets of grafters, known as political parties, and the one got the office which bought the most votes. Now and then, the election was very close, and that was the time the poor man came in."

Although this The Jungle is fiction, I defer to John Updike when he said in an interview on NPR not long before his death something like...."Truth is fiction; fiction is truth".  

What is proposed in the book, U.S. Crisis: Art, Education and Society, is that everything causes everything else. What our schools demand that students achieve or don't achieve eventually surfaces in our society.  Our society is reflected and predicted in art. A society that cannot discriminate between art and entertainment is unable to perceive itself in art's  mirror. Some of those that attend and graduate from our floundering schools become teachers. And the circle is perpetuated.

The circle must be disrupted and reshaped into a system that guarantees that our schools graduate well educated students, our society expects itself to be able to understand and improve itself through engagement with art, the election system encourages the most brilliant minds and best people to serve publicly and the voting process is devoid of financial influence.