Blake Today
From the Head of School
The Arts at Blake
 When I was an undergraduate physics major, I had a professor who spoke sharply against the entrenched, misleading and unhelpful hierarchy in allied fields of study. He explained that some of his colleagues saw mathematics, given its purity, precision and universality, at the top of a pyramid. Physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology and geology followed, in that order in this conventional ranking. Those particular mathematicians and natural scientists didn't even deign to include the social sciences, humanities or arts in their great chain of worthy disciplines. Such assignments of relative value to different ways of knowing the world are at best myopic and self-serving and at worst stultifying and dehumanizing.
A liberal arts education holds that a variety of perspectives, various ways of knowing, are critical to one's education from the earliest years of elementary school through one's undergraduate education and beyond. Blake has long had a strong commitment to the arts as a central and essential component of its required course of study. How many of us harbor, however privately, our own hierarchy of the various academic disciplines that mirrors the rigid ranking my undergraduate professor railed against? I suspect many place English and mathematics in the top slots, followed by science and history. Then usually comes foreign language, the arts and then physical education. I'd like to challenge this orthodoxy.
At Blake, we push back hard against such conventional "wisdom," and over the last decade we have strengthened and broadened the arts offerings in all divisions of the School. During this same period, major investments have been made in the physical facilities that support this component of our curriculum. The arts facilities have been major foci of the expansions and renovations on all three campuses.
Our very youngest students spend significant time exploring music, visual arts and drama. Throughout Lower and Middle School, you can see what we value by calculating the time in our limited day that we devote to it. In Upper School the offerings are electives and multiply to include ceramics, drawing, painting, acting, digital media, instrumental music, vocal music, printmaking, photography and many others. There are Blake students for whom their experience on stage or in the studio is in every way as profound and as influential as their experience in the labs or on the fields. Our commitment to the "three As" — academics, athletics and arts — is unwavering. This issue's feature article will give you a flavor of the arts at Blake today.
Aesthetics, beauty, form, line, color, rhythm, dissonance, character study and ensemble work are but a few of the key concepts explored in the arts experiences we offer. In the last few years we've added a strings program to our already strong instrumental program, and this component of the music offerings is now flourishing in the Lower and Middle Schools. The annual drama productions include the ritual fifth grade play and major productions in both Middle and Upper Schools but also, increasingly, some impressive student-written works produced in the Adams Black Box Theater and interdisciplinary arts classes in Middle School.
The Twin Cities is nationally recognized as an arts hotbed. Our students are fortunate to be able to see plays at the Children's Theatre and the Guthrie and to visit exhibitions at the Institute of Arts and the Walker. Rigorous studies show high correlations between arts study and advanced academic achievement in other disciplines. But it isn't this more utilitarian benefit of arts study that motivates us to emphasize the arts. Our children become more human as they wrestle with making music, as they take on another's character on stage, and as they express their world views in their drawing and painting.
When budgets grow tight in some schools, the hatchet often first falls on the arts. Blake is fortunate to enjoy strong support from its parents and alumni, allowing us to offer to all of our students as full an exposure to the arts as we do to mathematics and English. One of the great wonders of a life in schoolwork is that no one can predict where the student will find her muse and how the student will come to establish for himself a personal standard of excellence. For some it comes on the ice playing hockey, others find it in the story of our collective history, and for others they sing and act and paint and play, and they fill us with hope and move us to tears with their artistry. Long live the arts!
John Gulla
Head of School
•Bulletin, February 2007
•Also in Blake Today
•From the Head of School
•From the Board of Trustees
•From Admissions
•Director's Corner
•From Advancement
•Highcroft Community Give Thanks at Celebration of Gratitude
•Profiles in Giving: The Annual Fund
•Honoring Our Past, Preparing For The Future:
The Jack Edie World Citizen Endowment Fund
•Grandparent and Special Friend Day
•Feature: Teaching The Language of Art at Blake
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