Ever since the fiscal crisis in New York City in the 1970s,New York City’s education programs have suffered. After school programs involving arts, music, and in many cases, sports, were cut to accommodate for the “basics” of education.
According to the report, Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts on Learning, children who participate in after-school programs generally attain higher academic achievement, behave better in class, handle conflict more effectively and cooperate more with authority figures and with their peers than their counterparts who are not in after-school programs. Learning in and through the arts can even help students overcome the obstacles of disadvantaged backgrounds.For example, one of the Champions of Change reports, using data from a study that followed over 25,000 students for 10 years, found that students consistently involved in music and theater show significantly higher levels mathematics proficiency by grade 12—regardless of their socioeconomic status.
Researchers, such as Elliot Eisner, believe that by cutting out art programs, public schools are limiting their students’ potential. Eisner explains that the arts do much more than simply provide an outlet for personal expression. He constructed a list of all the benefits an arts education provides a student based on evidence found in his research. The list is as follows:
1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships.Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.
2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solutionand that questions can have more than one answer.
3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives.One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solvingpurposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.
5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects.The arts traffic in subtleties.
7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material.All art forms employ some means through which images become real.
8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said.When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.
9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.
10. The arts’ position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.
SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications. NAEA grants reprint permission for this excerpt from Ten Lessons with proper acknowledgment of its source and NAEA.
