Art is essential to learning-not just an educational frill. Learning about the visual arts gives students a window onto the rich and interesting world around them, teaching them about their own history and culture, as well as those of other people. It cultivates self-expression, imagination and creativity as well as critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. Students who learn about art develop their capacities to weigh meanings and make evaluations and judgments. Understanding and making art can teach students how to work cooperatively in groups and how to work hard to achieve a goal.
The development of all of these skills and attributed not only makes students better learners but it also helps students feel good about themselves-it builds self-esteem. And in a world in which ideas and information are often delivered visually, children need to learn how to analyze and judge the meaning of images and how to use them to communicate their own ideas.
Today’s educators and business leaders consider these skills and attributes vital to individual achievement and America’s progress. Yet the fact is that most schools have experienced budget cuts in art programs during the last 10 years and, as a result, some schools offer little or no instruction in art. The students at these schools are missing an opportunity to expand skills so necessary to succeeding in a competitive economic environment in our culturally diverse, visually oriented world.
Education in the arts and through the arts is essential, and a complete approach to learning includes comprehensive visual arts education for grades K-12.

Parents and Art Education
Parents can make a difference: by encouraging their children’s participation in art at home, by supporting art programs in their community and by helping to decide how art will be taught in school. Parents can become influential spokespersons for improving school art programs.
By working together with school staff, with members of art organizations and with other individuals, parents can make sure that art has an important place in their children’s education and in the community. By holding a special PTA meeting on the value of art education, you will build parent awareness about why art education is an important part of every student’s education. You will show parents that Be Smart, Include Art is not just another slogan and that they can play a crucial role in supporting art education.
The most important thing that parents and all of us can do is to encourage education leaders and elected officials to support the inclusion of art education in the basic curriculum. We can all make a major difference through our contact with these individuals.

The following article is produced by The National PTA and the Getty Center for Education in the Arts.

The first reason is that art helps children discover the joy of creating. We live in an age of technology, where many kids spend large amounts of time in front of computers, televisions, or video games. Their tendency is to sit and watch. However, we were created to create, and today, especially, young people need opportunities to stimulate their imaginations.

The second reason is that when you help your children learn to draw, you are helping to develop his or her self-esteem and self-confidence. What a great feeling for a child to be able to say, “Look what I did!” or “I can draw that!” I have seen my students and my own children gain a sense of accomplishment when they step back and look at what they have been able to do.

- art-made-easy.com

The arts are one of the main ways that humans define who they are. They often express a sense of community and ethnicity. Because the arts convey the spirit of the people who created them, they can help young people to acquire inter- and intra- cultural understanding. The arts are not just multi-cultural, they are transcultural; they invite cross-cultural communication. They teach openness towards those who are different from us. By putting us in touch with our own and other people’s feelings, the arts teach one of the great civilizing capacities – how to be empathetic. To the extent that the arts teach empathy, they develop our capacity for compassion and humaneness.

*Many of the quotes that appear in this paper were taken from articles downloaded from the internet and the original page numbers could not be cited. The original publication details appear in the references.

Fowler also says that it is feeling rather than intellect that connects us to other people, but this is not to deny the power of the arts in developing children’s cognitive capacities. Gardner (1985) believes that “a human intellectual competence must entail a set of skills of problem solving…enabling the individual to resolve genuine problems or difficulties that he or she encounters and, when appropriate, to create an effective product… and must also entail the potential for the finding or creating problems… thereby laying the groundwork for the acquisition of new knowledge” (pp60-61). Given that problem-solving, as Gardner suggests, is fundamental to intellectual competence, Eisner (1982) notes that, “the problems that most people have in their lives, the dilemmas that plague them the most, are quite unlike the clear and unambiguous solutions found in school textbooks and workbooks” yet much of the present school curriculum tends to emphasise “forms of representation having a syntactical structure in which black-and-white, true-false, and correct and incorrect answers are dominant”. He asks, “How do we prepare children for life by posing problems to them in which ambiguity is absent and the need for judgement rare?” (p. 52) While I acknowledge that all areas of the curriculum have the potential to develop an imaginative and creative intellect in children, the part that can be played by the arts in this development has often been neglected. Many people do not associate the arts with “thinking”, unaware that.

The arts are not so much a result of inspiration and innate talent as they are a person’s capacity for creative thinking and imagining, problem solving, creative judgement and a host of other mental processes. The arts represent forms of cognition every bit as potent as the verbal and logical/mathematical forms of cognition that have been the traditional focus of public education (Cooper-Solomon, 1995).

We should also note that the arts complement the sciences because they nurture different modes of reasoning. The British aesthetician and critic, Herbert Read, went so far as to say, “Art is the representation, science is the explanation… of the same reality” (Fowler, 1994). The arts are able to teach divergent rather than convergent thinking and encourage children to come up with different, rather than similar, solutions because the solutions to artistic problems are multiple. The arts break through the black-and-white, true-false, memorise-that, name-this that cause Eisner concern. This kind of reasoning is far more the case in the real world, where there are often many ways to address a problem and, “An effective work force needs both kinds of reasoning, not just the standardized answer” (Fowler, 1994). In his music advocacy speech at the 1996 Grammy Awards, Richard Dreyfuss announced, “It is from that creativity and imagination that:

the solutions to our political and social problems will come. We need that Well Rounded Mind, now. Without it, we will simply make more difficult the problems we face” (Dreyfuss, 1996). Fowler (1994) sees the arts as a powerful path towards Dreyfuss’ “well-rounded mind” stating that When we involve students in creative problem solving, we invite their participation as partners in the learning process. Instead of telling them what to think, the arts engage the minds of students to sort out their own reactions and articulate them through the medium at hand. Their beings become embedded in the task so that they learn from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Such figuring-out requires critical thinking, analysis, and judgement; students tend to stay on task because they are creating their own world, not replicating someone else’s. Being able to think independently is the basis of creativity. It is also an engaging way to learn. The arts invite students to be active participants in their world rather than mere observers of it.

The results of balancing the arts with other learning areas in the curriculum have shown that where 25% or more of the curriculum is devoted to arts courses, students acquire academically superior abilities (Perrin, 1994), demonstrating an apparent relationship between learning in the arts and other areas. Perrin also refers to long-term educational aims, saying that workers at all levels in our post-industrial society need to be creative thinkers and problem solvers and able to work collaboratively, they must be judicious risk-takers, they must be able to push themselves towards high levels of achievement, and they must have the courage of their convictions, and that arts education develop such skills. Perrin suggests that these attributes are nurtured in the arts because “the student artist (musician, dancer, visual artist, writer, or actor) learns by doing” (Perrin, 1994).

One of the aspects that makes the arts unique is their capacity to communicate information and/or meaning through means other that verbal/language. A number of researchers now suggest that cognition, perception and feeling are all closely linked. Louis Arnaud Reid states that “I conceive of feeling as cognitive as well as affective, as always having content or an object. Even when we cannot possibly say what we feel, we are feeling a quality of something, though unnameable” (Reid, 1986, pp 5-6). In reinforcing this point, Swanwick states:

We may agree with Einstein and Iris Murdoch and also with Polanyi, that “we can know more than we can tell” (Polanyi, 1967). There are, though, other ways of “telling” besides verbal language. The arts as ways of knowing are as potentially powerful as any other form of human discourse and they are just as capable of contributing to the development of the mind on a conceptual level (p.48).

References
Commonwealth of Australia, (1995). Arts Education. Report by the Senate Environment, Recreation, Communications and the Arts References Committee.
Cooper-Solomon, D. (1995). The arts are essential. School Arts, 94, (6), p. 29.
Dreyfuss, R. (1996) Speech at the 38th Annual Grammy Awards February 29, 1996.
Eisner, E. (1982). Cognition and Curriculum: a basis for deciding what to teach. Now York: Longman.
Fowler, C. (1994). Strong Arts , Strong Schools. Educational Leadership, 52, (3), p.4.
Gardner, H. (1985). Frames of Mind: the theory of multiple intelligences, New York: Basic Books.
Jeanneret, N. (1995). Developing preservice primary (elementary) teachers’ confidence to teach music through a music fundamentals course. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Sydney.
Perrin, S. (1994). Education in the arts is an education for life. Phi Delta Kappan, 75 (6), p. 452
Reid, L.A. (1986). “Art and the arts”, Assessment in the arts, Ross, M. (Ed.), Oxford: Permagon Press.
Reimer, B. (1989). A Philosophy of Music Education, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. (second edition.)