By Eliminating the Arts We Are Undermining Our Founders Vision of America
Submitted by Steve on June 22, 2012
From Nicholas Ferroni at The Huffington Post:
In 1780, during some of the most crucial years of the Revolution, John and Sam Adams, and John Hancock felt it necessary to charter an academy in Cambridge, even before America won its independence. It seems obvious that only a military academy would be that important to create in the midst of a war, but it was not a military academy. In fact, they founded the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, one of the most prestigious societies of research and study in the United States. Adams penned the Academy's motto himself; it read “To cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honour, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.”
Its honorary first class in 1781 included Ben Franklin and George Washington. The fact that the founding fathers chartered an academy focusing on the arts in a country which still was not technically theirs should be definitive proof how fundamental they felt the arts were to an enlightened nation.