The best schools have the best arts programs. Excellence in education and excellence in the arts seem to go hand in hand. What is the connection? Why are schools with strong arts programs better schools? How do the arts add significantly to the dimensions of general education? I will attempt to answer these questions, showing through visual examples why the arts are one of the hallmarks of excellent schooling.
A More Comprehensive Education
Ideally, the best way to study the world is to experience it firsthand. If you want students to learn about space exploration, you might take them to Cape Kennedy in Florida or to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. In deference to the difficulties and the expense of teaching through direct experience, as desirable as it might be, schools have substituted more expedient modes: reading, mathematics, science, history, and the arts—the great repositories of human wisdom and achievement.
If, for example, students are studying the Grand Canyon, and we want to give them a general idea of it without actually going there, we often resort to a verbal description: “The Grand Canyon, the world's largest gorge, is a spectacle of multicolored layers of rock carved out over the millenniums by the Colorado River.” If we want to convey its vastness, we use measurements: “The Grand Canyon is over 1 mile deep, 4 to 18 miles wide, and more than 200 miles long.” Each of these symbolic systems—words and numbers—permits us to reveal important aspects, but a picture or painting can be equally telling.
The arts—creative writing, dance, music, theater/film, and visual arts—serve as ways that we react to, record, and share our impressions of the world. Students can be asked to set forth their own interpretation of the Grand Canyon, using, say, poetry as the communicative vehicle. While mathematics gives us precise quantitative measures of magnitude, poetry explores our disparate personal reactions. Both views are valid. Both contribute to understanding. Together, they prescribe a larger overall conception of, in this case, one of nature's masterpieces.
We need every possible way to represent, interpret, and convey our world for a very simple but powerful reason: No one of these ways offers a full picture. Individually, mathematics, science, and history convey only part of the reality of the world. Nor do the arts alone suffice. A multiplicity of symbol systems are required to provide a more complete picture and a more comprehensive education.
A More Engaging Way to Learn
The arts complement the sciences because they nurture different modes of reasoning. The arts teach divergent rather than convergent thinking. They ask students to come up with different, rather than similar, solutions. Unlike many other subjects students study, the arts usually do not demand one correct response. In this way, the arts break through the true-false, name-this, memorize-that confines of public education. For every problem there may be many correct answers. This kind of reasoning is far more the case in the real world, where there are often many ways to do any one thing well. An effective work force needs both kinds of reasoning, not just the standardized answer.
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 judgment; 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. But it's not busyness alone that matters. Their participation in the task is teaching them something incredibly important. In the process of creating their own visions, students learn craftsmanship. Arts curriculums invariably teach students how all the expressive details work together, and how important those details are.
If you think about it, fine workmanship is the centerpiece of Japan's economic triumph. “Made in Japan” evokes a vastly different image today than it did in the 1930s. Why? Because the Japanese have learned to exercise craftsmanship in their industries. The arts require students to apply standards to their own work, to be self-critical, and to be able to self-correct. Through the arts, students learn self-discipline and how to handle frustration and failure in pursuit of their goals. These attributes are essential to a competent work force and well-made products.
Workmanship requires a personal commitment to excellence. The arts call for students to stretch their inner resources and put them to work to attain their own image of perfection. Through the arts, students learn that they can make their own unexceptional beings extraordinary and uncommon. They can invent a broader universe in which to see new dimensions and create their own visions of the world as it was, is, and might be. Because the arts cultivate the imaginative thought processes—the source of creativity—they energize the motivation to learn. These mental capacities are basic to competitive success in a global economy.
A More Cohesive Curriculum
With a subject matter as broad as life itself, the arts easily relate to aspects of almost everything else that is taught. But, by and large, the arts are not conveyors of information. Dance and music do not add to our information overload. Their purpose is not to convey data but to supply insight and wisdom—in a word, meaning. Their power is that they can move us. They serve as connectors that give understanding a human dimension. They tell us about people—how they thought and felt and what they valued. They help us to define ourselves and our times, as well as other people and other times.
The arts are powerful tools of communication. Each of the arts functions as a communications system that allows students, like humans down through the ages, to set forth certain observations, interpretations, and possibilities. And the arts of the past continue to communicate to us if we learn how to “read” and translate their symbolic codes.
For example, to help students understand the difference between the way people thought and lived during the Renaissance and Baroque periods, historical accounts can be enriched by the additional perspective provided by the arts. In this regard, a comparison of styles of architecture and design during these periods can provide insight and clarity. We can see that the systematic, ordered thinking that prevailed in the Renaissance gave way to the dynamic and elaborate drama of the Baroque, the latter exemplified by the music of J. S. Bach. The move is from light and small to heavy and massive, from simple to complex. Students can make these comparisons and discoveries themselves, and they can experiment with their own designs, contrasting the more controlled Classical view with the freer Romantic vision. In this way, the arts overlap and reinforce learnings in other areas.
Inevitably, the arts convey a sense of time and place that transports students, helping them to go beyond mere facts to experience the past in a more personal way. Music, for example, evokes how people of other times and places felt and thought. Through their music, the people of past ages come alive again, projecting the spirit of their beings across the centuries. In this way, the arts can enliven history, giving it a human dimension that draws students in.
The arts can also extend the understandings of science. If students are learning the nature of our solar system and how the Earth turning on its axis every 24 hours causes the sun to appear to rise and set, the science of astronomy can help them understand this phenomenon. It can provide part of the truth about sunrises and sunsets, but the exhilaration we feel at the birth of a new day is another part of the meaning or truth of a sunrise.
The British aesthetician and critic Herbert Read once said, “Art is the representation, science the explanation—of the same reality.” But the arts and the sciences relate different aspects of that reality. When used well, the arts are the cement that brings all the disparate curricular areas together. In the best schools, this is often the case. The arts are valued for their interdisciplinary potential. The result is a more cohesive curriculum in which students explore relationships across disciplines. Truth and understanding are recognized as a composite of perspectives, not just one necessarily partial and tentative view. Science, after all, is in a constant state of flux. In this sense, the arts in conjunction with other aspects of the curriculum afford students more complete and compelling conceptions. They provide another panorama of meaning and knowing.
Bridges to the Broader Culture
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 multicultural, they are transcultural; they invite cross-cultural communication. They teach openness toward those who are different than we are.
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. While intelligence can be used as a tool of greed and deception, empathy intercedes, reining in such uses of intelligence. When we listen to the lyrical loneliness of an American-Indian flute sounding an ancient melody, the sounds evoke the spirit of the tribe. Indian dances have the same effect. By experiencing an actuality of their civilization, we learn that American tribal peoples often have been wrongfully and demeaningly stereotyped.
There is a near miracle here because as soon as we have a glimpse of other people's humanity, we have crossed the cultural chasm that separates us. It isn't intellect that connects us to other people; it is feeling. Because people define themselves through their artistic expressions, these expressions communicate their human essence. This is why the arts serve as major ways we identify with those who came before us and those who live beside us. The arts teach respect.
A More Humanistic Curriculum
One of the most important contributions the arts make to the development of young people is the cultivation of their emotional and spiritual well-being. The human spirit in all its manifestations is central to the arts. Think of the great cathedrals, mosques, and temples, the paintings, sculpture, and music that have been created around the world to put us in touch, and to sustain our contact, with the spiritual world. Students can be inspired by the arts to reach deeper within themselves and stand in awe of dimensions of life we cannot fully grasp—to contemplate our fragile and temporal being and the meaning of life in the vastness of the cosmos.
The arts introduce us to human perceptions and understandings we could not acquire any other way. At their best, they always enlighten. Theater, for example, explores the foibles and triumphs of humanity past and present. What is behind the velvet curtain? A slice of life that we can view from a distance and, one would hope, with greater objectivity. We see ourselves reenacted. By experiencing human situations and their consequences, students better understand themselves and others.
Auguste Rodin's sculpture, The Burghers of Calais (1886), for example, recreates a tragic episode in the Hundred Years' War, the conflict between England and France. Five male figures, each a study of despair, are shown as they prepare to see Edward III, the English king laying siege to Calais in 1347. These citizens sacrificed their lives to save the city. In their slow and agonizing dance, we confront the human suffering wrought by war and the nobility of these citizens; the scuplture evokes the nature of that distant conflict so that we all can relate to it.
But such artworks accomplish something even more important. They show us, by example, extraordinary human possibilities. The Burghers demonstrate the human capacity to withstand adversity and to triumph over it. Like many other artworks, Rodin's sculpture shows students that they can reach beyond the ordinary and the mundane to discover their own magnanimity and capacity for humaneness.
We are creatures of feeling as well as thought, and schools that recognize this basic fact and address it are better schools. Science and technology do not tend to our spirit. The arts do. That is their role. That is why and how they complement and counterbalance the rest of the curriculum. Our spirit needs as much nurturing as any other part of our mind. Schools that ignore it are cold and desolate places. Remember: If we fail to touch the humanity of students, we have not really touched them at all. And schools that do not teach the arts are, quite literally, creating a generation that is less civilized than it could be, more barbaric than it should be.
The Arts Are Our Humanity
The arts provide a more comprehensive and insightful education because they invite students to explore the emotional, intuitive, and irrational aspects of life that science is hard pressed to explain. Humans invented each of the arts as a fundamental way to represent aspects of reality; to try to make sense of the world, manage life better, and share these perceptions with others. The arts therefore enrich the curriculum by extending awareness and comprehension while affirming the interconnectedness of all forms of knowing. This is why an education without the arts is an incomplete education.
As processes for distilling certain kinds of personal meaning, the arts are vehicles for imaginative learning. As self-enablers, the arts involve students in exploring the life around them, past and present, and instructing and inventing the future. Through the arts, students see the common bond they share with people across different cultures who also express themselves and communicate through their indigenous artistic expressions. In these ways, the arts enhance the capacities of students to participate significantly in their world. It's no wonder, then, that schools that give comparable attention to the arts are better schools.
Strong arts, strong schools. Where this relationship is understood, the arts are not the first to go when budgets tighten. Rather, the arts are viewed as essential components of a general education. They are not just for the gifted and talented. Like math and science, they are of benefit to all. When cuts have to be made, they are not made to the arts alone but across the board. Enlightened school boards know that without sufficient emphasis on the arts, students are deprived of a whole world of understanding.
The arts are not pretty bulletin boards. They are not turkeys and bunny rabbits. They are not frivolous entertainment. The arts are our humanity. They are the languages of civilization through which we express our fears, our anxieties, our hungers, our struggles, our hopes. They are systems of meaning that have real utility. This is why schools that provide students with the means and the encouragement to explore these realms provide a better education. This explains, too, why the arts are a mark of excellence in American schooling.
