From cave drawings to urban graffiti, humans have expressed themselves through imagery. From the first tapping of a stick on a rock, humans have endeavored to create music, to create song and dance. They sculpt, they paint, and they arrange materials of all kinds into all manner of objects.

Artistic endeavors are the first attempts at human communication outside of speech. When a child draws stick figures, a square house, and a spiky yellow sun, she is drawing a map of her world.

Art programs do far more than expose students to Monet, or teach them how to play an instrument. Art programs teach students the underlying skills for such undertakings as mapmaking, sewing, mathematical comprehension, and creative writing. Art programs aid students in understanding human anatomy, architecture, social dynamics, and color theory.

The reason the practicing of artistic endeavors makes students smarter is not because they specifically learn to draw a house or sculpt a pot. The reason is that art teaches humans how to think.

A student need not be a gifted artist to paint a picture. He only needs to grasp the concepts of spatial relevance, of perspective, of color theory, anatomy, architecture.

Such lofty concepts are more easily understood when a student learns them through the process of painting a picture.

Consider spatial relevance. To explain such a concept to a young child is an exercise in futility. But an art teacher will say to the child, "Here is a big piece of paper. I want you to paint your house, your pet, and you. I want you to fill the whole paper."

This young child begins, on a rudimentary level, to build a knowledge base for spatial relevance. He will draw on this as he encounters such challenges as geometry class.

Art for the sake of art is a worthy enough reason to maintain high caliber art programs in schools. But because school boards and taxpayers require a more academic basis for funding, the development of cognitive thinking and imagination during early school years can be a persuasive argument. That middle school and high school students who continue to participate in art lessons do better on their standardized tests should also persuade administrators to include art programs into their budgets.

The importance of keeping art programs in schools, though, is not quite so analytical, so narrow or absolute as art classes make for better test scores.

The creation and appreciation of art in all its forms is an intricate part of cultural identification. It conveys a sense of geographical placement, of social mores, of a people's history and its future. In art there is symbolism, there is storytelling, there is the sense of humanity's place within the universe.

If these abstract concepts are not instilled in generations to come, if the true sense of artistry is lost to the masses, then the artistry of reading and writing, of mathematics and science will be lost. Humans will be little more than drones, until we are not even that.

Learn more about this author, Shelly Mcrae.
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