Importance of Art History in Preap College Board Visual Arts
A writer, arts enthusiast, and online ambassador for visual storytelling has a modest proposal for K-12 education: Allow's trade "fine art" for "creativity."
Fine art, they say, is great for kids. Art and music programs help keep them in school, make them more than committed, heighten collaboration, strengthen ties to the community and to peers, amend motor and spatial and linguistic communication skills. At-risk students who accept art are significantly more likely to stay in school and ultimately to get college degrees. A study by the College Lath showed that students who took four years of art scored 91 points improve on the SAT exams (Hawkins, 2012).
Awesome.
Yet, arts educational activity has been gutted in American public schools. After the recession of 2008, lxxx% of the nation'southward schools faced upkeep cuts. In the meantime, No Child Left Behind and the Common Core State Standards pushed educators to prioritize science and math over other subjects. Arts programs were the first victims. And, predictably, lower income and minority students were the almost likely to lose their art programs. In Los Angeles County alone, one-tertiary of the arts teachers were let go betwixt 2008 and 2012; for one-half of the county's Chiliad-5 students, art didactics disappeared altogether (EdSource Staff, 2014). As of 2015, just 26.2% of African-American students had admission to art classes (Metla, 2015).
Every bit the economy has improved, there has been some discussion about reversing some of these cuts. But that'southward not enough.
I'g no expert on educational activity, merely having spent a lot of fourth dimension in schoolhouse art programs over the by couple of years, here's the impression I go: In the lower grades, kids simply accept fun drawing and painting. They don't really demand much encouragement or instruction. In middle school, the majority start to lose their passion for making stuff and instead learn the price of making mistakes. All too ofttimes, art class becomes a gut, an opportunity for adolescents to screw around. By high schoolhouse, they have been divided into a handful who are "cocked" and may keep to art school and the vast majority who have no interest in art at all.
In short, every child starts out with a natural interest in fine art, but for well-nigh it is slowly drained away until all that'south left is a scattering of teens in eyeliner and black clothing whose parents worry they'll never motility out of the basement.
Here's a modest proposal: Allow'south take the "art" out of "fine art instruction."
"Art" is not respected in this land. It's seen as frivolity, an indulgence, a way to keep kids busy with scissors and paste. "Art" is an elitist luxury that hard-nosed bureaucrats know they tin can cut with impunity. And so they exercise, making math and science the priority to fill the ranks of future edible bean-counters and pencil pushers.
So I suggest we get rid of "art" educational activity and replace it with something that is crucial to the time to come of our world: creativity.
A creative cadre?
Nowadays, we all need to be creative in means that we never did, or could, before. Solving problems, using tools, collaborating, expressing our ideas conspicuously, beingness entrepreneurial and resourceful — these are the skills that matter in the 21st-century, mail-corporate labor market. Instead of beingness defensive about fine art, instead of talking about culture and self-expression, we have to focus on the power of creativity and the skills required to develop information technology. A great creative person is besides a problem solver, a presenter, an entrepreneur, a fabricator, and more than.
Imagine if creativity became a core part of One thousand-12 education . . .
Instead of teaching kids to paint bowls of fruit with tempera, we'd show them how to communicate a concept through a sketch, how to explore the world in a sketchbook, how to generate ideas, how to solve real problems. Theater would be all about collaboration, presentation, and problem solving. Music classes would emphasize creative habit, teamwork, the honing of skills, composition, improvisation.
We'd teach creative process, how to come up with ideas, how to detect inspiration, how to steal from the greats. We'd teach kids to work effectively with others to better and test their ideas. Nosotros'd teach them how to realize their ideas, how to get them executed through a supply chain, how to present and market and share them.
Nosotros'd also emphasize digital creativity, focusing on cutting edge (and cheap) technology, removing the bogus divide between arts and science, showing how engineering and sculpture are related, how drawing and User Feel (UX) Design are facets of the same sort of skills, how music and math mirror each other. We'd teach kids how to use Photoshop to communicate concepts, to shoot and cutting videos, to design presentations, to use social media intelligently, to write clearly considering it is primal to survival. We'd give kids headed for minimum wage jobs a hazard to be entrepreneurial, to create truthful economic power for themselves, by developing their creativity and seeing opportunity in a whole new manner.
Aye, I know that there are high-school video classes and art computer labs, only they need to exist turned into engines for creativity and usefulness, non abstract, loftier-falutin' artsiness based on some 1970s concepts of expression. Don't make blackness and white films nigh leaves reflected in puddles; make a video to promote adoption at the local animal shelter. Don't do laborious charcoal drawings of popular stars; generate new ideas on paper. Make full 100 sticky notes with 100 doodles of ways to raise consciousness most the surroundings or income inequality or h2o conservation. End making pinch pots; instead, build a 3-D printer and turn out artificial hands for homeless amputees.
(And, by the way, if we teach kids loads of math and science but don't encourage their creativity, they aren't going to grow up to be bully engineers and scientists and inventors and discoverers — merely drones and dorks.)
Creativity is not a ghetto, non a clique, not something to exist exercised lonely in a garret. Nor is it a freak show of self-indulgent divas and losers. Rather, creativity is about helping solve the world's many problems. We need to brand certain that the kids of today (who will demand to exist the creative problem solvers of tomorrow) realize their creative potential and have the tools to employ them. That matters far more than football games and standardized test scores.
References
EdSource Staff. (2014, Apr eight). Endeavor to revive arts programs in schools gains momentum. EdSource .
Hawkins, T. (2012, December 28). Will less art and music in the classroom really help students soar academically?Washington Post.
Metla, V. (2015, May 2014). Schoolhouse art programs: Should they be saved? Law Street.
This slice originally appeared as a mail service on Gregory'southward web log: https://dannygregorysblog.com
/2016/04/15/ lets-get-rid-of-fine art-instruction-in-schools.
Originally published in April 2017 Phi Delta Kappan 98 (vii), 21-22. © 2017 Phi Delta Kappa International. All rights reserved.
Source: https://kappanonline.org/gregory-lets-get-rid-art-education-schools/
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