Why Art?
Visual art is a fun and enriching experience. No matter what path in life my students choose, the experiences they receive in art class will develop the essential skills they need in the future.
Our educational system needs art programs because they enrich the curriculum and learning experience. Additionally, educational research shows that art education improves students’ academic performance and makes positive changes in the school environment. Whether you realize it or not, our world can’t exist without the arts. Think about it - no logos, no advertisements, no road signs, no illustrations in books or magazines, no video games, no movies, no TV, etc... Our world is infused with the arts. Society should be thinking…Why wouldn’t art be included and valued just as much as the core subjects in schools?
Our educational system needs art programs because they enrich the curriculum and learning experience. Additionally, educational research shows that art education improves students’ academic performance and makes positive changes in the school environment. Whether you realize it or not, our world can’t exist without the arts. Think about it - no logos, no advertisements, no road signs, no illustrations in books or magazines, no video games, no movies, no TV, etc... Our world is infused with the arts. Society should be thinking…Why wouldn’t art be included and valued just as much as the core subjects in schools?
1. 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 problems can have more than one solution
and that questions can have more than one answer.
3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives.
One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret 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 fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects.
The arts traffic in subtleties.
7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material.
All art forms employ some means through which images become real.
8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said.
When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.
9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source
and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.
10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young
what adults believe is important.
SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications. NAEA grants reprint permission for this excerpt from Ten Lessons with proper acknowledgment of its source and NAEA.
Videos - Speaking Up for the Arts
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