Education / The museums of Oahu are helping to lead the way in educating Honolulu’s young people, not only with respect to arts and humanities, but across curricula. As reverberations of the battered economy continue to hamper State spending, these museums are becoming more important to island students than ever.

“A lot of the burden, making sure they’re getting adequate education, rests on us,” said Quala-Lynn Young, education curator at The Contemporary Museum. “Every museum is really doing double-time trying to get programs into the schools because we know how much they’re really starved for it. And they always have been. It’s just even more pronounced now, given the economy.”

The Contemporary Museum’s basic educational model is similar to those of its peers: a representative from or trained by the museum will spend time with students in the classroom both before and after their museum visit.

“Many students have never been to an art museum,” said Young. “A lot of them especially have no idea what contemporary art is, and it prepares them for their visit and introduces them to new vocabulary and new concepts.”

The Hawaii State Art Museum uses a similar model, which it developed in conjunction with the Department of Education as part of the DOE’s Museum Education Program.

“We work very closely together with State Foundation on Culture and the Arts,” said DOE Educational Specialist for Fine Arts Alison Ibara-Kawabe. “For the tours that the children take, we give them all of the curriculum based on what is in the museum and what [educational] benchmarks we’re looking for.”

Schools with at-risk students, often those who come from low-income households, can qualify for free class trips (including the cost of busing) to the Hawaii State Art Museum. Successful grant-writing efforts have allowed The Contemporary Museum to offer its educational programs–including teacher visits and gallery tours–at no cost to schools (some other local institutions require a small per-student fee), but they do so under enormous staffing constraints.

“We’ve been able to get the money to fund this but we lost half of our staff a year ago and it’s hard just to serve this number of students with a limited staff,” said Young. “The schools are thrilled to know that it’s all free because we’ve really removed all the obstacles to them being able to come. But it’s still a struggle, you know?”

The increasing fiscal stress under which local arts entities struggle to operate is well-documented. In addition to TCM’s unprecedented staff reduction last fall, Bishop Museum eliminated more than 30 employees’ positions in the span of a year and drastically reduced its operating hours. Even the Honolulu Academy of Arts, an institution founded for the purpose of arts education, has difficulty funding its wide array of educational offerings–programs that are largely viewed as extra-curricular educational enhancement, but actually help dictate how and what local children learn on a fundamental level.

“We attach our tours and programs to the DOE benchmarks and train the docents to be sure they understand the benchmarks,” said Honolulu Academy of Arts Education Curator Betsy Robb. “So, for example, one of the benchmarks in science is making sure that children know how to classify: Is this a mammal or is it a reptile? This is one of the things we address with animals in art.”

While the diversity of local museums’ educational programs allows Honolulu school children to learn about art, science, history and other topics in a way that’s dynamic, integrated, and otherwise unavailable to them in a classroom setting, they’re also given a variety of methods by which to grasp what they learn.

“There are so many different ways of learning–there’s tactile, auditory, visual–and different children have different emphases on how they learn,” said Elizabeth Nosek, who serves as the senior curator of education and collections at the Mission Houses Museum. “Museums are able to provide all of those different types of avenues to come to the subject and help it be more understandable.”

And while these programs’ cross-topic depth is a positive thing, museum officials do worry about an educational emphasis away from the fine arts. The concern comes as both museums and schools consider federal standards–enacted through former President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act–that educators complain emphasize test results over teaching quality, and punish schools that underperform.

“With no child left behind, fine arts is listed as a core subject, but not a tested subject,” said the Academy’s Robb. “So if they don’t meet those [tested] standards, a school can have sanctions placed on them where they are not allowed to go on field trips.”

But curators don’t necessarily have the luxury of creating educational programs based solely on what any number of artists or educators might deem essential components of arts education–simply because museums play such a critical role in basic education initiatives.

“It’s tricky, because when you look at who’s legally responsible for education, it’s the state and the school system,” said Nosek. “But schools and teachers are in a position where they have to rely on us. We should be very concerned for the state of education, whether it’s the schools that are facing cuts or the museums. Well, it’s both. And we’re already stretched so thin. When we cut jobs in museums and cultural organizations that help people understand the world that they’re in, we’re cutting off our ability to understand ourselves.”