Why Schools Should Not Cut Art and Music Because of Kids Career
A writer, arts enthusiast, and online ambassador for visual storytelling has a modest proposal for Thousand-12 instruction: Let's trade "art" for "creativity."
Fine art, they say, is smashing for kids. Fine art and music programs assistance keep them in school, make them more committed, heighten collaboration, strengthen ties to the community and to peers, better motor and spatial and language skills. At-risk students who take fine art are significantly more likely to stay in schoolhouse and ultimately to get college degrees. A report past the College Lath showed that students who took four years of fine art scored 91 points better on the Sabbatum exams (Hawkins, 2012).
Awesome.
Still, arts education has been gutted in American public schools. Later on the recession of 2008, 80% of the nation's schools faced upkeep cuts. In the meantime, No Child Left Behind and the Mutual Core Country Standards pushed educators to prioritize science and math over other subjects. Arts programs were the first victims. And, predictably, lower income and minority students were the most likely to lose their art programs. In Los Angeles County solitary, i-third of the arts teachers were let go between 2008 and 2012; for half of the county's Thou-5 students, fine art instruction disappeared altogether (EdSource Staff, 2014). Every bit of 2015, simply 26.2% of African-American students had access to fine art classes (Metla, 2015).
As the economy has improved, there has been some discussion near reversing some of these cuts. But that's not enough.
I'thousand no proficient on education, but having spent a lot of fourth dimension in school art programs over the past couple of years, here's the impression I get: In the lower grades, kids just have fun drawing and painting. They don't really need much encouragement or instruction. In middle schoolhouse, the majority start to lose their passion for making stuff and instead larn the price of making mistakes. All besides often, art class becomes a gut, an opportunity for adolescents to screw around. By high school, they take been divided into a scattering who are "artsy" and may go on to art school and the vast majority who take no interest in art at all.
In curt, every child starts out with a natural interest in art, just for most it is slowly drained away until all that'south left is a handful of teens in eyeliner and black habiliment whose parents worry they'll never move out of the basement.
Hither's a modest proposal: Let's take the "art" out of "art instruction."
"Art" is not respected in this country. Information technology'south seen every bit frivolity, an indulgence, a way to continue kids busy with scissors and paste. "Art" is an elitist luxury that hard-nosed bureaucrats know they tin cutting with impunity. And so they do, making math and science the priority to fill the ranks of futurity bean-counters and pencil pushers.
So I suggest we get rid of "fine art" education and replace it with something that is crucial to the future of our world: inventiveness.
A creative core?
Nowadays, we all demand to exist creative in ways that nosotros never did, or could, before. Solving problems, using tools, collaborating, expressing our ideas clearly, beingness entrepreneurial and resourceful — these are the skills that matter in the 21st-century, post-corporate labor market. Instead of being defensive about art, instead of talking about culture and self-expression, we have to focus on the ability of creativity and the skills required to develop information technology. A neat artist is too a problem solver, a presenter, an entrepreneur, a fabricator, and more.
Imagine if creativity became a core part of Thousand-12 education . . .
Instead of teaching kids to paint bowls of fruit with tempera, we'd show them how to communicate a concept through a sketch, how to explore the globe in a sketchbook, how to generate ideas, how to solve real problems. Theater would be all about collaboration, presentation, and trouble solving. Music classes would emphasize creative habit, teamwork, the honing of skills, limerick, improvisation.
We'd teach creative process, how to come up with ideas, how to find inspiration, how to steal from the greats. We'd teach kids to piece of work finer with others to improve and test their ideas. We'd teach them how to realize their ideas, how to get them executed through a supply chain, how to present and market and share them.
Nosotros'd also emphasize digital creativity, focusing on cutting edge (and inexpensive) technology, removing the artificial divide between arts and science, showing how engineering and sculpture are related, how cartoon and User Experience (UX) Design are facets of the aforementioned sort of skills, how music and math mirror each other. We'd teach kids how to use Photoshop to communicate concepts, to shoot and cutting videos, to blueprint presentations, to use social media intelligently, to write clearly because it is cardinal to survival. We'd give kids headed for minimum wage jobs a chance to exist entrepreneurial, to create true economical power for themselves, by developing their inventiveness and seeing opportunity in a whole new way.
Yes, I know that there are high-school video classes and fine art computer labs, but they need to exist turned into engines for creativity and usefulness, not abstract, high-falutin' artsiness based on some 1970s concepts of expression. Don't brand black and white films near leaves reflected in puddles; make a video to promote adoption at the local brute shelter. Don't practice laborious charcoal drawings of pop stars; generate new ideas on paper. Fill 100 sticky notes with 100 doodles of ways to raise consciousness about the environment or income inequality or water conservation. Finish making compression pots; instead, build a 3-D printer and turn out artificial hands for homeless amputees.
(And, by the way, if we teach kids loads of math and scientific discipline but don't encourage their creativity, they aren't going to grow up to be great engineers and scientists and inventors and discoverers — only drones and dorks.)
Creativity is non a ghetto, not a clique, not something to be exercised alone in a garret. Nor is it a freak show of self-indulgent divas and losers. Rather, creativity is virtually helping solve the globe's many problems. Nosotros demand to make sure that the kids of today (who will demand to be the creative problem solvers of tomorrow) realize their creative potential and accept the tools to use them. That matters far more football games and standardized test scores.
References
EdSource Staff. (2014, Apr 8). Effort to revive arts programs in schools gains momentum. EdSource .
Hawkins, T. (2012, Dec 28). Will less fine art and music in the classroom really help students soar academically?Washington Post.
Metla, V. (2015, May 2014). School fine art programs: Should they exist saved? Law Street.
This slice originally appeared equally a post on Gregory's blog: https://dannygregorysblog.com
/2016/04/15/ lets-get-rid-of-art-education-in-schools.
Originally published in April 2017 Phi Delta Kappan 98 (seven), 21-22. © 2017 Phi Delta Kappa International. All rights reserved.
Source: https://kappanonline.org/gregory-lets-get-rid-art-education-schools/
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