“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
The big question in education today is why are the arts important?
Art teaches us to be creative; it allows us to create something new something tangible and exciting. It opens us up to a world of possibilities where reality fails to do so. It challenges us to think outside the box. Art makes us unsatisfied with normal in order to look for new possibilities. Making us problem solvers and connects us to the past. Throughout history, society has created Art to capture a moment in time. Gave us the ability to study who we were in order to see what we will become allowing us to explore different cultures, world views and beliefs. It transcends geographical frameworks. Artists find connections among human beings all over the world.
There's a big issue probably in education system that funding for arts education is always under stress and that school boards are wondering do we cut the art or do we keep the science and there's tension.
If you think of it, in order to really succeed in whatever math and the sciences and engineering, you have to be able to think outside of the box and you have to be creative problem solving in the way those disciplines are taught is not totally creative. It's has more like this is this.. this is this… this is that. The creative thinking in the arts a certain amount of arts education doesn't mean that your ambition is to grow up to be a painter but you can use that kind of thinking and apply it to anything else like business, engineering and be better at it. You succeed more and you bring more to the world because you have these abilities that came from outside of your discipline. So bringing different worlds together has definite tangible benefits in to kind of cut one or separate them is to injure them and cripple them.
Think of culture and you visit other countries and then we see what it is that makes them them and not you. And in almost every case you do this you are looking at their art. You are looking at their architecture, you are looking at aspects of their civilization that has been empowered by science and engineering and so for anyone to say let us cut art for anything else suppose they did that back in Renaissance Europe what would Europe be without the support and interest in a thriving culture of art as we readily spend money to visit the city's and go to their museums to turn around and say now going to cut the art budget here that makes no sense. It may be that science and art which we know sort of go together. The Arts and Sciences our colleges of institutions it may be that art and science thought of in that way are the only true things that we create that lasts beyond ourselves everything else comes and goes. Don't know what one can do if there is a country without art that's not a country one wants to live in. There is a country without science you're living in a cave. We measure the success of a civilization by how much well they treat their creative people.
So why is art education important? Simply art what makes us human.