Sometimes it's nice to suffer mistaken identity. Last year my friend, Nova Southeastern University Professor Judy Stein, introduced me to the director of Nova's outstanding art museum in Fort Lauderdale as the professor who showed that art museums make you smart.
I meekly confessed that, actually, my colleagues down the hall did the museum studies. Lucky for me, the busy museum director didn't hear that part, eagerly introducing me to his staff as "that professor from Arkansas who did the study in the New York Times that art museums make you smart."
I came away with free admission, some enthusiastic new friends, and a VIP tour of the museum's excellent holdings, a must-see on any trip to Florida.
So what was all the fuss about? After years of dismissal as old-fashioned and marginal to schooling, museums are gaining new respect as key to a well-rounded education. Museum trips can even improve performance on standardized tests. My own academic department at the University of Arkansas is leading the way, with Jay Greene and his team doing a series of peer reviewed articles summarized in the New York Times in "Art Makes You Smart." (You can read the piece at tinyurl.com/NYTartsmart.)
The opening of a major art museum in Arkansas--Crystal Bridges--where none existed before allowed Jay to conduct scientific studies involving thousands of students, comparing those whose classes were selected by lottery first to attend field trips to the museum with others attending later. Jay and his team found that months afterward, compared to their peers, students who had gone on the museum field trips "demonstrated stronger critical thinking skills, displayed higher levels of social tolerance, exhibited greater historical empathy and developed a taste for art museums and cultural institutions."
The greatest gains came among rural and disadvantaged students, those least likely to enjoy prior exposure to cultural amenities like museums. (Years back, I was one of those.)
Impressed, enterprising Springdale Public Schools Principal Maribel Childress worked with another University of Arkansas team to do a smaller study, finding that her Monitor Elementary students did far better on science tests after their trips to a science center at Hobbs Creek State Park.
Monitor now incorporates those field trips into its science curricula, cutting the percentage of students performing below basic on Arkansas science tests from 25 percent to 6 percent.
I remembered all this recently when, still tired from winning election to our local school board, my wife made me arise at 5 a.m. to help chaperone our daughter and 70 other kids on the Fayetteville Public Schools Gifted and Talented field trip to the National World War One Museum and Memorial in Kansas City. In the end I was glad I did.
Museum docent Dave, a onetime history teacher, explained the causes of the war including the proximate cause, perhaps the most improbable political assassination in history. Displays covered the politics, strategy, tactics, weapons, war at sea, air power, trench warfare, gas warfare, the home front, and the war's aftermath. Students sampled WWI poetry, prose and music, and could design their own war propaganda.
Special hits for the kids included displays of French and German trenches, a real two-man tank, and a mockup of a French farmhouse destroyed by a shell.
The last American WWI vet, Frank Buckles, died back in 2011. Our daughter's middle school peers probably never met a veteran of "the war to end all wars." Yet many kids told me they will remember the museum entrance, a bridge above 9,000 silk poppies, each representing 1,000 WWI deaths. Several remarked on the fact that France lost more soldiers in WWI than our much larger nation has lost in all its wars combined.
Field trips take a lot of work from teachers, administrators and parents, and cost at least a little money. Even so, I'm glad that the public schools our kids attend find ways to continue trips to museums, plays, battle sites and science centers.
Evidence suggests these are investments worth making.
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Robert Maranto is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and has two children in Fayetteville Public Schools. The views expressed here are his alone.
Editorial on 10/05/2015