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Why Teach Art?
Recently I read yet another article in the ARGUS LEADER
about eliminating the arts from South Dakota schools. Evidently, when
money gets tight, art courses tend to be among the first to be cut. This
is a dangerous trend for at least two reasons.
First, art is intrinsically valuable and useful. When students in our
schools take courses in the arts taught by serious, full-time art teachers,
we should all feel privileged that those students are taking part in an
ancient, universal activity that puts them in touch with aspects of human
experience that other courses in the curriculum cannot address nearly
as well, if at all. Doing art, and experiencing it as partakers, involve
the whole person, not just a part of that person.
The second reason why we shouldn’t cut art courses has to do with
the ways we learn and remember. Book learning is an extremely recent phenomenon.
For most of our tens of thousands of years as a species, there were no
books at all, and so learning had to be vastly more experiential than
it has been since the invention of writing around 4,000 B.C., or the printing
press, a mere eye-blink of about 500 years ago.
No doubt we still have a natural inclination to learn things in a hands-on,
experiential way and not through concepts found in textbooks. Watch children
listening to nursery rimes—they can’t help but learn with
their bodies. Recent studies of the human brain have begun to have a significant
influence on education, and many believe the new knowledge will eventually
change the way children are taught. According to Howard Gardner, a neurologist,
educator, and author of many books on learning and individual competence,
each of us has many kinds of intelligence, such as verbal, spacial, musical,
bodily-kinesthetic, logical-mathematical, and interpersonal. Each of these
intelligences helped our distant ancestors adapt to the exigencies of
early environments. For example, a spatial intelligence was needed for
locating oneself spatially; a bodily-kinesthetic intelligence was needed
for control of bodily movements; and an interpersonal intelligence was
needed for discerning the moods and intentions of others.
As a teacher of literature and writing for over 30 years, and an artist-in-residence
in schools in South Dakota and other states for over 25 years, I’ve
noticed that some students who are otherwise average academically can
create extraordinary poems and stories. Not only should these and other
artistically-gifted students have access to art courses; curriculums should
be designed so that no type of intelligence or way of learning is overlooked.
Some students may learn nonverbally better than verbally. The point is
that if a given student can’t grasp a concept in, say, a science
class, that student may grasp the same concept if it is presented in a
play, a poem, or a painting.
Art is not a mere pastime, it’s not a frill, and it’s not
something that can be dropped from school curriculums with impunity. It
belongs in our schools because it matters.