A careful reading of the blog posts on this page and on the pages of many of our owners will reveal that we, as a group are deeply concerned with the education trends in this country and how, as a culture, we seem determined to teach the creativity, individualism, and genius out of our children. This animate was adapted from a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA's Benjamin Franklin award who brilliantly touches on these issues. For more information on Sir Ken's work and to learn about his current best selling books, The Element and Out of Our Minds, you can visit his site here.

In honor of the upcoming Arts In Education Week September 12-September 18, we have republished "Why Teach The Arts?". We hope that this argument written by a student intern, the product of the DISD's wonderful arts program and a senior in Modern Dance at the University of Utah, will be of interest to all of those interested in the role and value of providing a strong education in the arts to our children. We also hope that those skeptics who believe teaching the arts is a frivolous waste of time may gain a new perspective. Without creativity there cannot be innovation and without innovation how can we expect to solve the problems that face us all?

by Chloé Langley

Is studying the arts in school valuable only for those wishing to become artists? Pablo Picasso answered this question when he said, "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist when he grows up." As Dissanayake pointed out art is a crucial part of what makes us human. We are all born with an artistic soul. Watch a four year old "dancing" to music only she hears or coloring a huge mural with only two shades of pink. Artistry is everywhere and so accessible. Children have the capacity to see beauty in the simplest things. A child will observe the sun and draw every picture for weeks with a huge yellow blob gracing the sky. They draw the same pictures over and over again just to illustrate the small differences. Children dance and dance, not needing to turn or to leap to impress their peers but just to move to express their joy. It is beautiful! But by not teaching the arts, we are allowing our cookie cutter, technological society to educate out this innate, fearless creativity.

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by Chloé Langley

Proponents of a strong education in the arts suggest that they should be a required component of primary and secondary education because they make a specific contribution to academic achievement. The Executive Summary of the REAP project reported that there were "three areas in which clear causal links could be demonstrated between the arts and achievement in a non-arts, academic area" these being Listening to Music and Spatial-Temporal Reasoning; Learning to Play Music and Spatial Reasoning; and Classroom Drama and Verbal Skills (Hetland and Winner). The LTTA study in Canada found that 6th grade students showed an 11 percentile increase in math computation and estimation skills at the end of three years in an arts enriched scholastic environment (Uptis ). Other studies show that students seem to gain a greater understanding of subjects when they work through their bodies or witness the material in a different perspective. Teachers who use rhyming and song can boost memory and recollection and yet other studies report increases in knowledge and understanding as well as in critical thinking, concept organization, and divergent thinking (Eisner 1999 145).

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by Chloé Langley

As a young person educated in a public school environment where art permeated every aspect of the curriculum, I have often wondered what affect this emersion in the arts had on my academic learning experience. The effect on my craft is clear. But did this course of study improve my ability to learn in other fields? Did I do well academically because I would have done well in any environment or did my early and continued studies in the arts give me tools that allowed me to be academically successful? Do I perceive benefit solely because my chosen field is in the arts? Is an education that includes a rich tradition in the arts of benefit only to students that wish to pursue an artistic career? Intuitively I know that the arts made me a better student. I see myself using creative thinking skills every day. “The human brain is the most complex system on earth, yet it is too often used…as a simple device for storage and retrieval of information” (Dickinson). Dogs can be taught to ring bells and rats to navigate mazes but memorization does not make them thinking animals.

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