Reasons Why the Arts Should Be Cut From Schools
A writer, arts enthusiast, and online administrator for visual storytelling has a small proposal for M-12 education: Permit's trade "art" for "creativity."
Art, they say, is great for kids. Art and music programs assist proceed them in school, make them more committed, enhance collaboration, strengthen ties to the community and to peers, improve motor and spatial and language skills. At-risk students who take art are significantly more than likely to stay in school and ultimately to get higher degrees. A study by the College Board showed that students who took four years of art scored 91 points better on the Sabbatum exams (Hawkins, 2012).
Awesome.
However, arts education has been gutted in American public schools. After the recession of 2008, 80% of the nation'south schools faced budget cuts. In the meantime, No Child Left Backside and the Common Core Land Standards pushed educators to prioritize scientific discipline and math over other subjects. Arts programs were the showtime victims. And, predictably, lower income and minority students were the most likely to lose their art programs. In Los Angeles County alone, 1-third of the arts teachers were let go between 2008 and 2012; for half of the county'south K-5 students, art instruction disappeared birthday (EdSource Staff, 2014). As of 2015, only 26.2% of African-American students had access to art classes (Metla, 2015).
As the economy has improved, there has been some discussion about reversing some of these cuts. Simply that's not plenty.
I'm no expert 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 simply have fun drawing and painting. They don't really need much encouragement or educational activity. In centre school, the majority start to lose their passion for making stuff and instead learn the cost of making mistakes. All besides often, fine art class becomes a gut, an opportunity for adolescents to screw around. By high school, they have been divided into a handful who are "artsy" and may proceed to art school and the vast majority who have no interest in art at all.
In brusk, every child starts out with a natural involvement in art, just for most it is slowly drained abroad until all that'southward left is a handful of teens in eyeliner and black clothing whose parents worry they'll never motility out of the basement.
Here's a minor proposal: Let's have the "art" out of "art teaching."
"Art" is not respected in this land. It's seen every bit frivolity, an indulgence, a manner to keep kids decorated with pair of scissors and paste. "Fine art" is an elitist luxury that hard-nosed bureaucrats know they can cut with impunity. And and so they do, making math and scientific discipline the priority to fill the ranks of future edible bean-counters and pencil pushers.
So I propose we get rid of "fine art" teaching and supersede it with something that is crucial to the hereafter of our world: creativity.
A artistic core?
Nowadays, we all demand to be creative in ways that nosotros never did, or could, before. Solving problems, using tools, collaborating, expressing our ideas clearly, being entrepreneurial and resourceful — these are the skills that matter in the 21st-century, postal service-corporate labor market. Instead of beingness defensive about art, instead of talking about culture and cocky-expression, nosotros accept to focus on the power of creativity and the skills required to develop information technology. A smashing artist is as well a trouble solver, a presenter, an entrepreneur, a fabricator, and more.
Imagine if creativity became a core part of One thousand-12 educational activity . . .
Instead of didactics kids to paint bowls of fruit with tempera, we'd show them how to communicate a concept through a sketch, how to explore the world in a sketchbook, how to generate ideas, how to solve real bug. Theater would be all about collaboration, presentation, and trouble solving. Music classes would emphasize creative addiction, teamwork, the honing of skills, limerick, improvisation.
Nosotros'd teach artistic process, how to come upward with ideas, how to notice inspiration, how to steal from the greats. We'd teach kids to work effectively with others to ameliorate and test their ideas. Nosotros'd teach them how to realize their ideas, how to go them executed through a supply chain, how to present and market and share them.
We'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 same 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 key to survival. We'd give kids headed for minimum wage jobs a chance to exist entrepreneurial, to create truthful economic power for themselves, by developing their creativity and seeing opportunity in a whole new way.
Yes, I know that there are high-school video classes and fine art figurer labs, simply they need to be turned into engines for inventiveness and usefulness, not abstract, loftier-falutin' artsiness based on some 1970s concepts of expression. Don't make black and white films about leaves reflected in puddles; brand a video to promote adoption at the local animate being shelter. Don't do laborious charcoal drawings of pop stars; generate new ideas on newspaper. Make full 100 viscous notes with 100 doodles of ways to raise consciousness about the environment or income inequality or h2o conservation. End making pinch pots; instead, build a iii-D printer and plough out bogus easily for homeless amputees.
(And, by the way, if nosotros teach kids loads of math and science only don't encourage their creativity, they aren't going to abound upwards to be groovy engineers and scientists and inventors and discoverers — only drones and dorks.)
Creativity is not a ghetto, not a clique, not something to be exercised alone in a garret. Nor is it a freak evidence of cocky-indulgent divas and losers. Rather, creativity is about helping solve the world's many problems. We need to make sure that the kids of today (who volition demand to be the creative problem solvers of tomorrow) realize their creative potential and have the tools to use them. That matters far more than football games and standardized test scores.
References
EdSource Staff. (2014, April 8). Effort to revive arts programs in schools gains momentum. EdSource .
Hawkins, T. (2012, Dec 28). Will less art and music in the classroom really aid students soar academically?Washington Post.
Metla, Five. (2015, May 2014). School art programs: Should they be saved? Constabulary Street.
This piece originally appeared as a postal service on Gregory's blog: https://dannygregorysblog.com
/2016/04/15/ lets-get-rid-of-art-teaching-in-schools.
Originally published in April 2017 Phi Delta Kappan 98 (7), 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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