Article July 25, 2011 Issue

Excerpts from Theatre: Its Healing Role in Education

Richard Morse

Vantage Press, New York, 2009

Every educator involved with theatre’s potential for healing, benefits from a knowledge of its healing traditions. 

Truly, what greater gift can we provide for our young people than in conveying a proper estimation of who they are? Certainly a vision of their true natures and capacities forms the underpinning of all else. 

With a little boost from us, our children can reopen the windows to a different world, where separation, frustration, and violence are replaced by connection, self-esteem, and celebration of family. 

Recalling a teaching visit to Kabul, Afghanistan: 

If many windows of the world seem recently to have been shattered, we can always look through others that wait only to be opened. 

Recalling a “Healing Through Humor” Siberian celebration:

How could one ever forget such an evening? Art had provided a magical trampoline on which we were all children bounding and rebounding higher and higher in an exhilarating dance to human fellowship.

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