Leonard Bernstein turned a prize into a school programme

Person: Leonard Bernstein
Lived: 1918–1990
Field: Music
From: American

The story

Leonard Bernstein believed the arts should be woven into all of education, not treated as an extra. He was a born teacher: he taught at Brandeis University from 1951 to 1956, explained music to millions in his televised Young People's Concerts, lectured at Harvard and spent his last decade founding academies for young musicians in Los Angeles, Germany and Japan. He said he was proudest of his achievements as a teacher.

In 1990, the last year of his life, Bernstein received the Praemium Imperiale, an international prize awarded on behalf of the Japan Art Association for lifetime achievement in the arts. The prize, first awarded the year before, honours painting, sculpture, architecture, music, theatre and film, and is presented in Tokyo in the presence of a member of the Japanese imperial family.

Bernstein used the 100,000 dollars in prize money to establish the Bernstein Education Through the Arts Fund, known as BETA, to develop an arts-based approach to teaching, and he began the work with a project in Nashville, Tennessee. The idea grew from his lifelong conviction that creativity and critical thinking are the most powerful ways to learn anything. He died that October, at the age of 72.

His colleagues carried it on. The Leonard Bernstein Center was established in April 1992 and carried out extensive research in schools. That work led to the Leonard Bernstein Artful Learning Program, a three-year professional development model for teachers. Rather than adding art classes to the school day, it changes how the core subjects, reading, writing, mathematics, science and social studies, are taught. Students encounter a concept, investigate it, create original work that shows their understanding, and reflect on what they learned.

Teachers learn the model at a four-day summer institute and receive coaching during the school year, and after three years each school continues the practice on its own. Run as a not-for-profit, Artful Learning has been used for more than 30 years in schools across the United States, from kindergarten to high school, keeping Bernstein's vision of learning through the arts alive in classrooms long after his death.