LITTLE ROCK — Former President Bill Clinton told a group of community arts organizers Tuesday he believes he never would have become president if he had not participated in a school music program.
“It taught me discipline and order. It made me listen better,” Clinton said in his keynote address at the 2012 Arkansas Art Summit at the Clinton presidential library. “And once I got into jazz I realized that you had to make some things up along the way, but while you were making them up you had to stay in the right key and still play in tune.”
Clinton said economic pressure on the nation’s schools, particularly during the financial crisis but even before the crisis began, has been prompting schools to eliminate arts and music and physical education programs.
“There’s lots of evidence that exposure to the arts, especially to the performing arts for a lot of kids and to the visual arts for others, increases their learning and reduces the dropout rate and changes the whole way they approach life,” he said.
Clinton said scientists have learned that different brains respond to different stimuli and learn in different ways.
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“There are an enormous number of people, little children, who will learn more about math and science and history and English if the arts are incorporated into the way they learn,” he said.
The two-day arts summit is presented by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the center’s DeVos Institute of Arts Management. The event is designed to help build and maintain strong arts organizations.
After his address, Clinton left for El Dorado, where he was scheduled to give the keynote address at Academic Signing Day at El Dorado High School.
Clinton was to honor this year’s recipients of the El Dorado Promise scholarship, a $50 million scholarship program funded by Murphy Oil.