After discussing Anne Haas Dyson’s piece On Reframing Children’s Words: “The Perils, Promises, and Pleasures of Writing Children” in class, I began to notice the different broader topics that my previous schools valued. Each of my schools placed a large value on math, science and literature/writing rather than more abstract topics such as art or music, thus placing higher cultural value on the former and lower cultural value on the latter. One aspect that demonstrates this is my middle school’s cancellation of my entire music program. Budget cuts had to be made, so my school cut the music program out entirely and immensely reduced the size of our art program. Other subjects–such as math, science and literature–were unaffected by the budget cuts. Moreover, my high school fortunately didn’t have any funding issues and actually did quite well for itself, offering a variety of musical and art based classes; however, none of these classes were required to be taken. In fact, I never took a single art or music class in my entire high school career. Other subjects were more encouraged to take, like foreign languages and business classes. I do regret my choice of avoiding music and art classes in high school, but now reflecting, I feel as if I didn’t take these classes as I felt like my school didn’t value them as much as other classes. Teachers would always remind you in your core required classes that you should definitely check out their accounting class or consider taking economics, but no one would recommend a class like ceramics or music theory.
