Republican presidential candidate and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee delivered a lecture about the integral role of the arts in the education system on Monday afternoon in Jones Performing Arts Center.
Huckabee, a 1976 Ouachita alumnus, spoke on behalf of Ouachita’s new Center for Education and Public Policy (CEPP), which hosted the lecture as the first in a series of lectures pertaining to the future of education reform.
“Your alma mater welcomes you with great pride,” said Ouachita President Dr. Rex Horne to Huckabee as he introduced him. “We’re grateful to this difference-maker who grew up not too far from here in Hope, Arkansas.”
Huckabee expressed his gratitude for having received a Ouachita education and then spoke about the importance of obtaining a “true music and arts education.” He pointed out that the educational system suffers whenever funds for the fine arts are cut or when these classes are not taught by certified teachers.
“If we are truly going to see not only an educational environment that challenges students, but also builds the kind of economy that will help us to be competitive and not just survive but thrive in the future of what we often speak of as a global economy, then we better make sure we do not neglect nor cancel out the importance, the value and the significance of an education that includes music and the arts,” Huckabee said.
Huckabee believes people’s creativity is increasingly being stifled and that the U.S. has focused on the logical left side of the brain to the extent that the capacities of the brain’s right side have been limited, leaving thousands of students bored at school.
“Music and art can be life-changing,” he said. “If we take it out of the hands of a child … we may have taken something not just from their hands, but from their hearts.”
Huckabee demonstrated the value of the arts as he referred to studies showing that students who study music will improve their academic scores in math, science and foreign language. He also said music improves spatial reasoning and capacity for the abstract and teaches students how to learn, and he described music as a cultural norm that transcends generations.
“The arts become an important part of who we are,” Huckabee said.
He cited another study that showed the best predictor of which high schoolers will attend and finish college was not race or poverty but “exposure to and participation in a broad, wide and rigorous curriculum, including music and art, at the high school level.”
Huckabee believes an education with music and arts give students “the confidence to do something else and to do it quite well.” As a musician who plays the bass guitar for his rock-n-roll band, Capitol Offense, Huckabee attested to the influence music had on his life — music has taught him discipline and team work and forced him to stand in front of an audience.
“One of the great tools we need to unleash is a weapon of mass instruction,” Huckabee said. “It is the power of music, the power of art, the power of creativity. It can change not just individual lives; it can change our nation and change our future.”
