by Margaret Mair

Created on: February 01, 2010

EVERY CHILD NEEDS THE ARTS

“We do not need more and better arts education simply to develop more and better artists. There are far more important reasons for schools to provide children with an education in the arts. Quite simply, the arts are the ways we human beings “talk” to ourselves and to each other. They are the language of civilization through which we express our fears, our anxieties, our curiosities, our hungers, our discoveries, and our hopes. They are the universal ways by which we humans still play make-believe, conjuring up worlds that explain the ceremonies of our lives. The arts are not just important; they are a central force in human existence. Every child should have sufficient opportunity to acquire familiarity with these languages that so assist us in our fumbling, bumbling, and all-too-rarely brilliant navigation through this world. Because of this, the arts should be granted major status in every child’s schooling.”

Charles Fowler, D.M.A.
Article on NewHorizons.org

The arts are a very powerful tool.  Songs and music have the power to evoke memories, good and bad.  Images, gazed upon, create moods and thoughts and feelings in the looker; in creating them we share our world with others.  Dancing gives us a sense of release.  The desire to sing, create, imagine and express ourselves are embedded deeply in us.  They express the emotional and irrational side of us - the side that has nothing to do with the logical and scientific.  So we are told.

Yet the separation of arts from sciences is a relatively recent one.  Look at da Vinci, who was as much scientist and engineer as artist.  The same powers of observation, accuracy in recording, application of knowledge and use of imagination served him equally well no matter what he was doing - creating a painting or developing the ideas behind the helicopter.   Progress is based not on what we know now, but what we can imagine - and he combined the creativity of the artist and the knowledge of the engineer to imagine flying machines and submarines all those years ago.

The arts are not just about encouraging wild flights of imagination.  Each branch of the arts has a long history of development, a history intertwined with the development of science and technology.  Music and mathematics, painting and geometry, the artists’ record of the natural world and biology - these are just a few of the places the arts and sciences have learned and grown together.  Could it be the inherent connections between arts and sciences that help children exposed to both to learn in a way that improves their understanding of what we consider the core subjects, like mathematics, sciences and languages? 

If so, then teaching the arts is not about teaching everyone  to become an artist, a dancer, an actor.  When we teach children the arts, we are teaching them far more than we realise.  We are giving them another set of tools for seeing, learning, understanding and sharing, giving them access to ideas, methods and techniques that are part of the foundation on which knowledge has been developed, and setting them free to explore and help create their own world.

And no child should be deprived of that.

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