In an Associated Press report published Tuesday (4/17) by The Republic (Columbus, Indiana), Andrew DeMillo writes, “Former President Bill Clinton on Tuesday praised school art programs for teaching discipline and creativity to students, crediting his music lessons as a child for his success as a politician. ‘If I had not been in a school music program, I would never have been elected president,’ Clinton said as he delivered the keynote address at the Arkansas Arts Summit. ‘Because it taught me discipline and order. It made me listen better. And once I got into jazz, I realized 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 praised the arts as he addressed a group of art administrators gathered at his presidential library for the two-day conference presented by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the Kennedy Center. Organizers said the event was aimed at strengthening arts organizations. … ‘We live in a very rapidly changing, highly interdependent, increasingly complex world,’ he said. ‘We need the discipline and order of a rigorous adherence to the facts of life and the creativity we can only learn, young to old, from the arts.’ ”
Posted April 18, 2012
