Federal Arts Bureaucrats Destroying Arts Education (Part I)

The "dumbing down" of America, thanks to federally-funded arts bureaucrats, continues relentlessly in the Bush administration, according to this fascinating account by Jackie Trescott in the Washington Post. Probably because they can't make any administrative overhead from grants for "arts education", administrators at the National Gallery of Art are going to put the wonderful volunteer docent guided tours for schoolgroups on "hiatus" (meaning cancellation, in the language of cowardly bureaucrats). Trescott should win a Pulitzer for her coverage of Washington, DC arts institutions and their stupid decisions. Here's here lede:

The National Gallery of Art is suspending its school tours for the next academic year as part of a general reevaluation of its educational programs. The guided tours served 34,000 students last year.

BTW, IMHO "Rusty" Powell, currently head of the National Gallery of Art, practically destroyed the Los Angeles County Museum of Art during his tenure there. So this kind of destructive decision by his staff isn't surprising. The only surprising thing is that there hasn't been more of an outcry from Congress on this one.

But of course, who in the "arts community" or the "education community" actually cares about DC-area school children learning about Renaissance Art?