A drama queen’s reenactment: Flourish and adapt in a modern society.

Being such a drama queen as a child, I had first hand experience of Stage schools.

I remember one bright day spent in drama school during the summer. We were rehearsing for a big production, which we were performing in a couple of weeks. It was lunchtime and a couple of us ‘part timers’ thought it would be fun to sneak round the back of the stage and into the ‘full timers’ classrooms on the first floor. Sneaking into the classrooms had the same excitement I can imagine you would feel, sneaking into Elizabeth Taylor's Broadway dressing room. We ran our hands over their beautiful diamond encrusted costumes and found old battered ballet slippers lying on the floor next to stacks of discarded exercise books.

We picked up the exercise books and began to flick through them, whilst keeping a steady eye out for anyone who might catch us. It was as I began to flick through the books, when I realized how spelling basic words like ‘bus’ was such a struggle for these young performers. Although they caught my imagination on the stage, they had very little reading and writing skills off the stage. After months of nagging my mum to go ‘full time’ I finally realized why she was so against it!

It wasn't until a few years ago that I remembered this day; I had just been watching a TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson:Bring on the learning revolution. This was about how we desperately need to revolutionize the curriculum, from an industrial model to an agricultural model. The message was that subjects such as English, Mathematics and Science are seen as vital subjects in the eyes of the curriculum the world over. Whereas subject such as Art, Music, Dance and Drama are more often than not, depicted as less valuable. Therefore, we are not allowing our children to develop the way they are naturally supposed to, that we are effectively crushing their creativity; a topic I very much agree with. However in making this link, I realized that although we need to ensure subjects involving the arts and performing arts need to be nurtured, so that we do not alienate and crush our children’s dreams. We also need to acknowledge that a proportion of performing arts centers may be taking this to the extreme, and not putting enough emphasis on basic literacy skills. Combine this with the acknowledgement that many of the performing art careers are quite often short term; these students need a full skill-set in order to have something to fall back on should their careers not go quite as planned.  Among the most-repeated claims is that the average U.S. worker will have many careers—seven is the most widely cited number—in his or her lifetime. Could this perhaps be put down to the fact that their school curriculum was too regimented, could these people still be searching  for their career calling, which may have been repressed in school?

The real challenge is finding the balance between allowing our children to explore their passions, and educating them with the fundamentals, not just survive but flourish and adapt in a modern society.

By Amber Williams

www.bearlainternationalstudies.com