"Scientific research and other studies have demonstrated that arts education can enhance American students' math and language skills and improve test scores which in turn increase chances of higher education and good jobs in the future"
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In a single breath, Cochran turns arts education into a jobs program with a scantron score. The intent is persuasive and legislative: justify funding for the arts by translating it into the currency that budget writers and skeptical voters recognize - measurable gains, higher education, employability. It is a survival strategy for the arts inside a political system that treats anything not immediately "useful" as indulgence.
The subtext is more telling. Cochran doesn’t defend arts education as a public good that deepens civic life or expands imagination; he defends it as an instrument for improving math and language. The arts become a delivery mechanism for STEM and standardized outcomes. That framing flatters an accountability culture built on metrics, while also conceding its terms: art is legitimate if it boosts test scores. It’s a clever pivot, but it quietly narrows what the arts are allowed to be.
Context matters. Cochran, a long-serving Republican senator from Mississippi, operated in an era when federal arts funding and school arts programs were routinely targeted as elitist or nonessential, especially under test-driven reforms like No Child Left Behind. By citing "scientific research", he borrows authority from empiricism to shield a historically vulnerable budget line. The sentence’s chain of cause and effect - arts to scores to college to jobs - mirrors the way politicians often have to sell education itself: not as enlightenment, but as workforce pipeline.
What works rhetorically is its pragmatism; what it reveals culturally is our discomfort with valuing art on its own terms.
The subtext is more telling. Cochran doesn’t defend arts education as a public good that deepens civic life or expands imagination; he defends it as an instrument for improving math and language. The arts become a delivery mechanism for STEM and standardized outcomes. That framing flatters an accountability culture built on metrics, while also conceding its terms: art is legitimate if it boosts test scores. It’s a clever pivot, but it quietly narrows what the arts are allowed to be.
Context matters. Cochran, a long-serving Republican senator from Mississippi, operated in an era when federal arts funding and school arts programs were routinely targeted as elitist or nonessential, especially under test-driven reforms like No Child Left Behind. By citing "scientific research", he borrows authority from empiricism to shield a historically vulnerable budget line. The sentence’s chain of cause and effect - arts to scores to college to jobs - mirrors the way politicians often have to sell education itself: not as enlightenment, but as workforce pipeline.
What works rhetorically is its pragmatism; what it reveals culturally is our discomfort with valuing art on its own terms.
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| Topic | Learning |
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