Art connects concepts, themes explored through experience
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“THE arts matter because art is meant to move people either on an intellectual or emotional level. Whether this is a book that stays with you days later, or a performance that moves you spiritually or a song that makes you look at the world around you in a different way. The purpose of art is to cause a reaction and with this purpose it can create a synergy of change; change in attitudes, perceptions, and thoughts.” — Catherine Brookes
Art is like no other subject students will undertake in their studies, as it links to all other academic subjects, presenting a back door into learning in those domains. Art is essentially skill based in most curriculum, yet it can connect concepts and themes explored through the lived experience of each individual student. Education scholarship is finding that the more arts student has in their academia, the better they perform across their subjects and socially. In a related study, Dr James Cantrell of University of California, Los Angeles, reports, “Academic grades, standardized test scores, measured reading levels and attitudes concerning commitment to community were all higher for students maintaining high levels of activity in music, chorus, drama and the visual arts.” This study of over 25,000 students’ responses to art in their curriculum points to a need for schools to look carefully at how balanced the contact time within the art lesson they provide their students.
In a meta-analysis report published for the National Endowment for the Arts by Sandra S. Ruppert, the arts were found to provide six significant benefits in child development: reading and language skills, mathematics skills, thinking skills, social skills, motivation to learn and positive school environment. Art is the intuitive, imaginative, emotive and cognitive innate life skill that all people possess. Art provides a means to empathize, communicate and understand our world, its social structures, its cultures, individuals and interdisciplinary concepts. Art domesticates complex and controversial topics and situations, through its unique language of image, symbol and semantics.
For students who aspire for careers in design such as architecture, interior design, environmental design, graphic design, marketing, fashion or industrial design, the visual art course is a good path. For students with other interests, the visual arts class offers them social and emotional development, and strategies for approaching real life challenges from alternative perspectives.
Culture, history, communication and aesthetics share space within the core of the subject. Students enjoy the course for many reasons, among them, hands-on problem solving, imagination stimulation and play, functional design and entertainment as learning. At once a course of utilitarian value, the mimesis of artistic practices researched and observed provoke cognitive challenges through thought and meditation. With a vocabulary of its own, visual art intellectualizes students in ways that serve every other course of study they undertake. For the approachable rigor the visual arts command, we remind the students they are more than creators, more than artists, they are aesthetic engineers.
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