ARTS EDUCATION
 

"Making a Case for Arts Education"

The arts are a powerful tool for use in education and training. Perhaps the learners are in school. Perhaps they are in a corporate training program. Maybe they have come together within an organization or community. The participants may be young or old, and from varied backgrounds. Artistic approaches to any subject of interest in an array of media can help institutions, organizations and society to achieve broader education, economic and social goals.

 
The arts help develop vital higher level skills. To succeed in the workplace and in our changing society, people must develop higher level skills, including creativity, problem-solving, the ability to
communicate in different ways, self-discipline, tolerance and critical thinking.

A growing body of research and decades of practice demonstrate that arts education can help ... develop these critical ... skills.

Higher level skills -- developed in part through the arts -- are essential to success in the workplace. Employers are looking for people who are creative and who are able to think critically, solve problems, communicate well, conceptualize, make decisions and learn and reason. The sought after worker is a continuous and highly adaptable learner, and an imaginative thinker who possesses a wide range of higher level thinking skills. Arts education can help students develop & reinforce these essential ... skills.

Arts education helps students to learn other subjects. People learn in different ways. ... The arts can also be used to accommodate students' individual learning styles, including those of special learners. Research shows that children who receive high quality arts education will often see marked improvem ents in their other studies. Students taught through the arts also tend to be more motivated and have a more positive attitude towards learning.

Assessment methods used in the arts can measure achievement in other disciplines. Over the years, the arts have developed a range of rigorous assessment methods that can be appliedeffectively to measure achievement in other disciplines. Arts assessment tools emphasize benchmarks and outcome-based learning and allow schools to assess student achievement and encourage continuous improvement. The goal is not simply to pass the test, but to learn more, achieve certain standards and continually do better."

Arts education develops the whole person and enriches students' lives.
 

excerpted from Making the Case for Arts Education,
The Ontario Arts Council, 1997.