Art Is the Answer
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- Date Submitted: 04/13/2015 04:11 PM
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Alana Rasche
12/10/2014
Art is the Answer
The arts are something schools only really pay attention to if they are proficient in all other subjects. Music, visual arts, drama, and dance are all considered secondary to other “more important” subjects (specifically the ones tested for under the No Child Left Behind movement). This has proven to be the most counterproductive motion one can make in attempt to boost test scores, attendance, and desire to learn. Fran Smith explains, “Years of research show that [art is] closely linked to almost everything that we as a nation say we want for our children and demand from our schools: academic achievement, social and emotional development, civic engagement, and equitable opportunity.”
As stated by Tamara Henry in USA Today, in 2002 a study was released that showed an explicit connection between the arts and social and scholastic improvement in students. This study, completed by The Arts Education Partnership and funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Department of Education showed that every art form had its own scholastic benefit to students. Music benefitted students’ math ability, verbal SAT scores, and foreign language comprehension. Dance promotes physical, mental, and emotional flexibility, offering improvements in creative thinking, self-expression, social tolerance, originality, and determination. Drama assists is social and comprehensive advancement, benefitting understanding of relationships, advanced issues, ethical thought, and social queues and story comprehension and attentiveness. Visual arts improve organization, advanced reading comprehension skills, and reasoning.
The time from this article’s publication to today has been over 12 years.
There has been blatantly and scientifically stated knowledge that arts education benefits students for 12 years with no increase in the presence of the arts in schools. In fact, this presence has diminished substantially in the years after...
12/10/2014
Art is the Answer
The arts are something schools only really pay attention to if they are proficient in all other subjects. Music, visual arts, drama, and dance are all considered secondary to other “more important” subjects (specifically the ones tested for under the No Child Left Behind movement). This has proven to be the most counterproductive motion one can make in attempt to boost test scores, attendance, and desire to learn. Fran Smith explains, “Years of research show that [art is] closely linked to almost everything that we as a nation say we want for our children and demand from our schools: academic achievement, social and emotional development, civic engagement, and equitable opportunity.”
As stated by Tamara Henry in USA Today, in 2002 a study was released that showed an explicit connection between the arts and social and scholastic improvement in students. This study, completed by The Arts Education Partnership and funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Department of Education showed that every art form had its own scholastic benefit to students. Music benefitted students’ math ability, verbal SAT scores, and foreign language comprehension. Dance promotes physical, mental, and emotional flexibility, offering improvements in creative thinking, self-expression, social tolerance, originality, and determination. Drama assists is social and comprehensive advancement, benefitting understanding of relationships, advanced issues, ethical thought, and social queues and story comprehension and attentiveness. Visual arts improve organization, advanced reading comprehension skills, and reasoning.
The time from this article’s publication to today has been over 12 years.
There has been blatantly and scientifically stated knowledge that arts education benefits students for 12 years with no increase in the presence of the arts in schools. In fact, this presence has diminished substantially in the years after...