by Carol Relf Kondrat

Created on: January 11, 2011

Art is everywhere in our world and shows how we feel about ourselves and our existence.   As people, we react to color and to sounds in everything we encounter each and every day.  We experience a myriad of sounds and splashes of color in everything we do from waking to falling asleep at the end of the day. The clothes we wear, the houses we live in, the cars we drive and the environment we move through in our daily existence.  The world has never been silent and it is not void of color.  Nature alone provides the arts for all to see and hear. 

The goal of education is to provide children with the knowledge and ability to go out in the world and function, survive and excel as they become contributing members of life as we know it. If schools are to produce well-rounded young adults, the arts programs are needed.   Schools are striving to address all learning styles (visual, auditory, tactile-kinesthetic) to provide an education for the diversity of students that are in the classrooms.   Gardner’s eight intelligences include spatial (art) and musical.  Learners usually are strong in at least one of the eight intelligences, but possess a portion of all of them. By taking away the arts programs, the learning styles and the different intelligences will not be addressed. There will be students that are left out in classroom instruction.

Pre-school and kindergarten begin with pictures and music.  The young learners read pictures first and then progress to words that go with the illustrations (art).  They learn the rhythm (music) of reading poetry and the sound of good sentence structure.    The earliest stages of learning use the arts.  Infants are exposed to sounds and colors in their world from birth.  Illustrations in early readers are there to reach the emergent reader.  “A picture is worth a thousand words” amply describes picture books that are the first reading encounter that elementary school teachers provide.

The arts programs are necessary in school from beginning to end.  Without them, the learning styles and the multiple intelligences are shorted.  Art and music have been traced back to cave dwellers and are part of history up to today.  All content areas in our education curriculum use pictures in some form  for an explanation or focus. The arts programs are needed to be kept alive because we need the creativity of new artists and musicians for the future generations.

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