From a Little Spark …

You can watch the rest of the videos at the City Songs YouTube channel.

Lewis told me via email that the teachers plan to keep using the curriculum and the artists are game to do it again. Brown noted that the “collaboration was both refreshing and exciting for me as an educator, as well as for my students. Watching them grow as writers through the whole process ... and seeing their faces light up while listening to the final drafts and giving essential feedback. [It] was so inspiring and exactly what education is all about.”

~~~

It is worth noting that Fulton High is one of those schools that pundits and policymakers commonly describe – or, more tragically, dismiss – as “disadvantaged.” It ranks near the bottom of statewide high school rankings (292^nd of 347); Austin East, the other Knoxville high school that Big Ears and Preservation Hall partnered with this year, ranks even lower at 328th. These schools are about as likely to turn up on the evening news due to student-involved shootings as for student achievement, and while this may owe something to the “if it bleeds it leads” imperatives of commercial news gathering, one sad fact remains: Students at Fulton and Austin East – hell, kids everywhere in America – are at a historically high risk of gun violence.

Tennessee ranks 41^st nationally in per student funding, and allocation formulas within the state leave schools like Fulton even worse off than that sad rank suggests. Our societal tendency to disregard the fate of schools like Fulton is nothing short of criminal, a cynical act of civic self-destruction and a staggering waste of human potential.

This is no shade on the Fulton faculty. Dedicated and creative teachers like Brown and Miller make a real difference. These heroes roll the rock up the hill day in and out with the added burdens of long hours, low pay, and steady harassment from people who consider public education an unnecessary, socialistic evil.

Partnerships like these between Big Ears and these schools have an undeniable impact, though its scope is necessarily constrained. Public education – especially in the arts – has been deprioritized for decades in America. A great tragedy of our social order is that we do not prioritize these kinds of investments. These kids are every bit as worthy of public investment as law enforcement and prisons.

Despite abundant research showing that investment in education is far more effective in reducing crime and boosting civic participation than expanding enforcement and incarceration – not to mention being cheaper and more humane – we insist on spending big in all the wrong places while trying to buy education on the cheap. Tennessee, for example, spends roughly three times as much annually per inmate as it does per student.

These kids are not stupid; they intuitively understand the valuation placed on their lives based on factors such as skin color and place of birth. For many of these students, the attention and respect afforded them by these renowned artists serves at least two critical functions.

First, these real-life role models offer a glimpse of what it might look like to live life as an artist. It affords a sense of possibility and expands the range of options that students might consider valid. It offers hope.

Second, it affirms to these students that their lives and experiences are important, that their stories are worth telling and their talents worthy of respect and nurturing. After two years of pandemic isolation, I am hard pressed to imagine anything more important for kids anywhere than to be truly and wholly seen and to know that they have as much right to dream big as anyone.

Many of us can remember a time when we held certain dreams to be real possibilities only to reach a fork in the road where we left that possibility behind. No judgment: Life happens. Existing as a career artist is difficult and terribly uncertain, and it damn sure is not for just anyone. But despite the growing tendency of late-stage capitalism to devalue those who make our world worth waking up to every day, people who choose the artistic path are heroes and role models who embody the grace that can visit those who commit to their muse.

Sure, odds are that few of these kids will pursue art as career, and the chance that any who choose that path will “make it” is vanishingly small. But if we must assess these efforts in probabilistic terms, let’s try this: It is almost certain that each of these kids will remember forever the taste of the creative impulse, that shiver of possibility and connection that occurs in the act of making and creating. This is the sacred spark that makes us capable of loving, sharing and caring for our fellow humans in a way that goes beyond base transactional arrangements. Art is not the only pathway, but it is tested and true.

The memory of that spark can never be erased despite the myriad social cues that urge us to trivialize art and artists. Believing oneself capable and worthy of a creative life is an act of revolutionary impertinence against the pressures that urge us to accept lives of numb mediocrity and that deem broad segments of our neighbors as hopeless or unworthy.

They are neither. We can ill afford to squander these wellsprings of latent promise; our situation is far too dire.

To quote Bob Dylan, “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” We owe it to the students and ourselves to nurture these sparks, to give them oxygen. In their turn, these are the people who will tend these sparks in the face of creeping darkness.

Keeping that spark alive may be the single most important act of faith we can offer.