Benefits of Arts Education in Schools

Joan's arts blog. . . .

What Life Lessons do the Arts Teach?

The membership breakfast was a huge success on May 29.  I would like to keep the theme of the  benefit of an arts education going for a couple of additional blogs.  The speaker at that breakfast, r. Barbara Laws,  distributed a handout prepared by the National Art Education Association entitled “The Visual Arts”.  While it was labeled visual arts, the information was about all types of the arts.  It contained a section on “Ten Lessons the ARTS Teach!  Let’s look at five of these lessons!

“ The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships, unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

2. The arts teach children that problem can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.  

3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives.  ……..there are many ways to see the world.

4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity.  Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

5. The arts make vivid the fat that neither word in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can now.  The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

Those of us in the arts community can use these points to advocate for the arts and encourage schools and the local community to support the arts, support the schools and our children who show a care, a love and passion for the arts.  Read my next blog to learn additional lessons that the ARTS teach!