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WHY IS ARTS IMPORTANT?....
mood: 
productive
productiveA latest blog entry by one of my buddies here on LJ debating the status of EQ (emotional intelligence) vis-a-vis IQ has inspired me to post an entry myself on the same lines.
Just recently I'd shifted my son's schooling from one of the prestigious institutions in town to a relatively new one for two simple reasons. One, the school didn't promote the much needed growth in arts. Two, a ridiculous student-teacher ratio of 55:1 or in other words zero room for student-teacher rapport.
Having traveled the long winded road of schooling, i knew only too well how influential "student-teacher rapport" could be when it came to performance in studies. And for children with really short attention spans, there's no better solution than a classroom index that supports a one-to-one between student and teacher.
As for arts, i've always believed it to play an important role in fine tuning our capabilities to appreciate the finer things in life.. but an article (which showcased the end result of an interesting survey) that i chancedly came across in the online edition of The Boston Globe, just heightened the merits of this branch of education to an all new level.. leaving me quite content with the realization of having made a wise decision with respect to my son's future.
The article was titled "Why is arts important" and i'm only too keen to share a few excerpts...
" It is well established that intelligence and thinking ability are far more complex than what we choose to measure on standardized tests. The high-stakes exams we use in our schools are almost exclusively focused on verbal and quantitative skills and reward children who have a knack for language and math and who can absorb and regurgitate information. They reveal little about a student's intellectual depth or desire to learn, and are poor predictors of eventual success and satisfaction in life. As schools increasingly shape their classes to produce high test scores, many life skills not measured by tests just don't get taught. While students in art classes learn techniques specific to art, such as how to draw, how to mix paint, or how to center a pot, they're also taught a remarkable array of mental habits not emphasized elsewhere in school. Such skills include visual-spatial abilities, reflection, self-criticism, and the willingness to experiment and learn from
mistakes. All are important to numerous careers, but are widely ignored by today's standardized tests.
In our analysis, we identified eight ``studio habits of mind" that arts classes taught, including the development of artistic craft. Each of these stood out from testable skills taught elsewhere in school. The prominent ones being: 1) Persistence: Students worked on projects over sustained periods of time and were expected to find meaningful problems and persevere through frustration. 2) Expression: Students were urged to move beyond technical skill to create works rich in emotion, atmosphere, and their own personal voice or vision. 3) Making clear connections between schoolwork and the world outside the classroom: Students were taught to see their projects as part of the larger art world, past and present.
Each of these habits clearly has a role in life and learning, but we were particularly struck by the potentially broad value of a few thinking skills (being taught in the art classes we documented) and each of which has a high value as a learning tool, both in school and elsewhere in life.
1) Observation: A task far more complex than one might think. Seeing is framed by expectation, and expectation often gets in the way of perceiving the world accurately. To take a simple example: When asked to draw a human face, most people will set the eyes near the top of the head. But this isn't how a face is really proportioned, as students learn: our eyes divide the head nearly at the center line. Observational drawing requires breaking away from stereotypes and seeing accurately and directly... Also trrying to notice what you might not have seen before. For instance, in Mickey Telemaque's first design class of the term at the Boston Arts Academy, ninth-graders practice looking with one eye through a cardboard frame called a viewfinder. ``Forget that you're looking at somebody's arm or a table," Telemaque tells his students. ``Just think about the shapes, the colors, the lines, and the textures." Seeing clearly by looking past one's preconceptions is central to a variety of professions, from medicine to law. Naturalists must be able to tell one species from another; climatologists need to see atmospheric patterns in data as well as in clouds. Writers need keen observational skills too, as do doctors.
2) Envisioning - Forming mental images internally and using them to guide actions and solve problems. We noticed art teachers giving students a great deal of practice in this area: What would that look like if you got rid of this form, changed that line, or altered the background?... prompting students to imagine what was not there. Like observing, envisioning is a skill with payoffs far beyond the art world. Einstein said that he thought in images. The historian has to imagine events and motivations from the past, the novelist an entire setting. Chemists need to envision molecular structures and rotate them. The inventor - the envisioner par excellence - must dream up ideas to be turned into real solutions. Envisioning is important in everyday life as well, whether for remembering faces as they change over time, or for finding our way around a new city, or for assembling children's toys.
3) Innovation through exploration - Art classes place a high value on breaking the mold. Teachers encourage students to innovate through exploration - to experiment, take risks, and just muck around and see what can be learned. In ceramics, for example, capitalizing on error is a major consideration and students were told not to worry about mistakes, but instead to let mistakes lead to unexpected discoveries.
We don't need the arts in our schools to raise mathematical and verbal skills - we already target these in math and language arts. We need the arts because in addition to introducing students to aesthetic appreciation, they teach other modes of thinking we value.For students living in a rapidly changing world, the arts teach vital modes of seeing, imagining, inventing, and thinking. If our primary demand of students is that they recall established facts, the children we educate today will find themselves ill-equipped to deal with problems like global warming, terrorism, and pandemics. Those who have learned the lessons of the arts, however - how to see new patterns, how to learn from mistakes, and how to envision solutions - are the ones likely to come up with the novel answers needed most for the future."
Meanwhile, let me grab some funky looking color pens and try channeling my son's attention away from the Game Boy.