Whenever school districts grapple with budget shortfalls, often the arts are the first programs cut. Currently, school boards in Florida, Michigan , California and across the United States are considering cutting arts and music from the elementary curriculum. While the federal No Child Left Behind Act defines the arts as part of the core curriculum, they are not included on standardized tests. Thus, the arts often take a back seat to the subjects (reading/English, mathematics, science) that are tested.
However, the arts are not fluff. According to David Sousa, in a 2006 School Administrator article, “How the Arts Develop the Young Brain,” the arts develop essential thinking skills, such as, pattern recognition, observation, and abstraction. Engagement in the visual arts expands how a child understands and relates to others and the world. The art-making process encourages children to stretch their minds in ways that other subjects may not – using invention, imagination, and emotion. The knowledge they acquire through the arts can transfer to new ways of understanding traditional academic subjects.
The Arts and Reading
For even young children, art is a language of expression. Drawing, scribbling, and doodling helps children learn to note and express details. Even if the lines on a page mean nothing to an adult, they mean something to the child. Every drawing has a story, a feeling, and a purpose. Encouraging children to make increasingly complex drawings helps them to develop specificity of language to express those details and observational skills to notice them in the real world.
The Arts and Math
Art and math also intersect in many meaningful ways. Artists use the mathematical relationships of perspective, shape, and balance when composing their work. According to a 2009 position statement by the California Kindergarten Association, “Art Really Teaches,” visual art is a perfect vehicle to teach concepts such as classification and sorting, spatial relationships (under/over, next to, behind, left/right, etc.), dimensional relationships (angles, distance, proportions, etc.), and number and quantity.
The Arts and Standardized Tests
Given the overlap of concepts, it is not surprising that research shows that children in balanced academic programs, where the arts are integral, perform better in reading and math. Sousa writes that a survey of more than 10 million high school students correlated participation in arts programs with higher mathematics, verbal, and composite SAT scores. The more years a student spent studying the arts, the higher their SAT scores were.
Moreover, the positive effect of arts classes are even more striking for traditionally disadvantaged children. At risk elementary students in schools that integrated the arts with other subjects outperformed matched groups of students on standardized reading tests. The theory is that the arts can reach students who are otherwise disaffected with school.
Art for Art’s Sake
Studies showing correlations between learning in the visual arts and performance in other academic areas offer a strong rational for integrated teaching, where the arts are used to further understanding across disciplines. However, the studies do not show causation. They do not prove that simple exposure to the visual arts (in absence of other factors) leads to improved performance in reading and math. As intriguing as the effect of art on other disciplines may be, it is not the main reason for learning about the fine arts.
In an increasingly visual world, children are bombarded with visual media from the earliest ages. A 2008 position statement published by the National Art Education Association, “Why Art Education,” states that “the ability to understand, respond to, and talk about visual images” has become an essential critical thinking skill. Moreover, Sousa says, the 21st century workplace values employees who can visualize situations, think creatively, generate new ideas, and successfully communicate with others using a variety of media.
The arts teach children to think in these new ways. They challenge preconceptions and enhance perceptual understanding. When children respond to works of art, it gives them exposure to someone else’s view of the world. They investigate how different individuals, groups, and cultures express themselves through the visual arts. They can then adopt those new ideas to use in communicating their own view of the world.
Today’s inventors are not usually creating new things, rather they are designing improvements to things already in use – a toilet brush with a curved handle, a flexible cutting board, bio-degradable planters, etc. In his 2006 book, A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink [Penguin Group] maintains that this intersection of art and science requires thinking across disciplines from people who have been trained to balance function with design, the parts with the whole, and facts with emotion. These are people who value the aesthetic as well as logic.
Simply put, the arts deserve funding in school budgets because they create balanced, empathetic thinkers who can solve problems creatively. Failure to fund the arts equals failure to nurture not only the budding Picassos, but also the next generation of Alexander Graham Bells, Watson and Cricks, and Einsteins.
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