The Importance of an Arts Education
By: Julie Popp
As an educator or administrator, do you see arts education slipping to the side and becoming mostly an elective to be taught only where available? Or perhaps they are mostly featured in your after-school programs? Or, if the arts play a large part of your school’s curriculum, is the focus on crafts?
Providing a holistic curriculum that includes arts is more essential in the 21st century. In addition to posing an essential, intrinsic value to mankind, an arts education helps develop crucial cognitive skills and fosters important personal and social aptitudes in children.
The arts allow us to communicate non-verbally about experiences, emotions and moments in time, or, in other words, permitting another form of expression. The visual language of art benefits children by developing their visual communication skills, or what some call, visual literacy. This can be a valuable tool for expression and instilling understanding through the use of images. This is a critical point, as children are generally less capable than adults to utilize words for expressing emotion or to tell a story.
Fostering a rich learning environment, the arts enable a powerful effect on student achievement through the development of cognitive skills. Recent research proves and clarifies the connections between the arts and specific types of cognitive development. These finding reiterate the connections that many educators already recognize.
A collection of studies called Critical Links states that the arts “engages and strengthens such cognitive capacities as spatial reasoning… conditional reasoning… [and] problem solving [as a] component of creative thinking.”
These skills translate into the capacity for organizing and sequencing ideas, theorizing about outcomes and consequences, as well as elaboration, originality and flexibility. This is just the tip of the iceberg, as many other skills can be attributed to studying the arts, including reading readiness, expansion of motor skills and sensory motor capabilities, as well creativity.
The arts help children develop many useful cognitive skills, such as communication, as well as developing the self-motivated learning that is essential to academic achievement. The arts create a positive learning environment, one that inspires children to higher achievement.
An arts education also nurtures a student’s motivation for learning, or as Governor Mike Huckabee stated in Why the Arts?, “[Students] learn to value effort and to get enjoyment and inspiration from its results.”
Self-motivation in learning means a student is more challenged, is less likely to indulge in hours of television, and is more likely to stay in school.
In addition, the study of the arts also benefits children’s social and personal growth, which lends to their academic and life successes.
As Critical Links expands its studies on the contributions of an arts education, it states that “Motivation and the attitudes and dispositions to pursue and sustain learning are essential to achievement. Learning in the arts nurtures these capacities, including active engagement, self-confidence and self-efficacy, and increases in attendance, educational aspirations and ownership of learning.”
The ability to express oneself through art builds a positive self-image, self-control, and the ability to collaborate and reach resolutions with other students, while gaining a better understanding for empathy and social tolerance. The arts provide a creative, intellectual environment in which children become self-motivated, lifelong learners and team players, as well as flexible, creative thinkers.
So what does creative thinking really mean? It is the capacity for students to develop artistic expression and understanding, which leads to high-order thinking skills such as analysis, synthesis and evaluation. The ability to construct meaning from an aesthetic experience requires critical and creative thinking.
As the workforce becomes more and more competitive over time, it is clear that in order to remain competitive, the future workforce will need to be a knowledge economy, a people able to “ think creatively, to communicate effectively and to work collaboratively,” as stated by Ann Galligan, author of Creativity, Culture, Education, and the Workforce. These skills are increasingly acknowledged and needed in order to remain a competitive economy in the 21st century.
So, this is a lot to teach in a short order of time during the school year. A structured and well-rounded art curriculum is key to facilitate these important learning environments and truly educate students to make and understand meaning in art.
A great arts program should consist of many art forms, minimally including theater, dance, music and visual arts. Studies in a report titled Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts on Learning support findings that students should be exposed to a broad spectrum of arts, lending to the habits of the mind and personal dispositions.
Additionally, a great arts program should approach each art form in a comprehensive manner, from all angles.
As former U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige said, “A comprehensive arts education may encompass such areas as the history of the arts, the honing of critical analysis skills, the re-creation of classic as well as contemporary works of art, and the expression of students’ ideas and feelings through the creation of their own works of art, [or] in other words, students should have the opportunity to respond to, perform and create in the arts.”
This more in-depth approach to studying the arts also leads to understanding and learning in other subjects, which may include history, math or science. In short, if a student’s art instruction consists of simply making crafts, they are only receiving a fragment of what learning in the arts can bring to their education. As wonderful as that fragment is, more can be done.
A great arts program, like any program, gets the best results when it is in the hands of a good teacher and with full support from administration. The benefits of any new program aren’t automatic, but rather take an individual, or individuals, that are willing to implement the program fully and assess successes according to the techniques provided by the program, or curriculum. A holistic approach, which includes studying all forms of art and making links to other subjects and life situations, will lead to better retention and understanding of the concepts.
Or, as best said by Karen Heid, writer for the Art Education Journal: “Only by increasing one’s skill in perception can one undergo the aesthetic experience with a work of art. It is not enough that the student understands or appreciates why an object is beautiful. Instead the student discovers how relationships are cultivated and forms are shaped. The student begins to order visual elements, seeing their connections. Through discerning connections, a Gestalt or ‘a-ha’ moment--an aesthetic experience--is possible.”
The arts create a fun and exciting learning environment, one that embraces a vision for the future in which children are creative thinkers and lifelong learners, prepared to achieve successes in each and every endeavor, rather it be personal, academic or social.
The arts breathe life into any subject matter, by helping learners discover, appreciate meaning and use art as another form of expression. And, the arts bring fun to learning by engaging the senses, whether through movement, color, texture or sound.
Julie Popp is the director of public relations for Gee Guides, www.geeguides. The company’s motto is “sayART, seeART, doART.”
Art Resources
1st Quality School Supplies
866-344-7133
www.1st-quality-school-supplies.com
Bender-Burkot
800-682-2638
www.bender-burkot.com
Dick Blick Art Materials
800-828-4548
www.dickblick.com
Cascade School Supplies
800-628-5078
www.cascadeschoolsupplies.com
Classroom Direct
877-698-1988
www.classroomdirect.com
Discount School Supply
800-627-2829
www.discountschoolsupply.com
Faber-Castell
800-642-2288
www.faber-castellusa.com
Grade A Educational Supply
888-908-7500
www.gradeaedsupply.com
Gramco School Products
718-788-0030
www.gramcoonline.com
Hexabits
734-389-2500
www.hexabits.com
Inovart
941-751-2324
www.inovart.net
Martin Universal Design, Inc.
313-895-0700
www.martinuniversaldesign.com
MasterGraphics
800-873-7238
www.masterg.com
NASCO
800-558-9595
www.enasco.com
Punkydoodles
800-428-8688
www.punkydoodles.com
Sargent Art
800-424-3596
www.sargentart.com
Scratch Art
800-377-9003
www.scratchart.com
Shrinky Dinks
800-445-7448
www.shrinkydinks.com
Teachers’ School Supply
800-477-7745
www.teacherssupply.com
United Art and Education
800-322-3247
www.unitednow.com
Wholesale Direct School Supply
866-934-7328
www.wholesaledirectschoolsupply.com
Wolkins School Supply and Equipment
800-233-1844
www.wolkins.com
