Your Performance Partners: The link between robust K-12 arts education today and a vibrant performing arts community tomorrow is easy to understand. Today’s students who are taught to explore, embrace and appreciate the arts are tomorrow’s actresses, musicians, stage & sound technicians, costume & lighting designers and – importantly – ticket-buying audience members and tax-paying citizens.
3 comments:
I often feel like our culture doesn’t value arts education. When I was in high school, art classes weren’t thought of as “real classes” because as my friend once told me about my sculpture class, “you don’t actually learn anything.” I’m guessing that aspect of my high school’s mentality isn’t unusual. Based on the statistics in this article, people do care about art in the sense they think it should be taught, but my guess is that most people would also say that art is less important than math. And how much our culture values art relative to other programs matters. Afterall, I don’t think funding for sports gets slashed away the way school art classes do, and that is probably because our culture places a lot of value on sports. 90% saying it is important but only 54% being willing to pay more for it shows that even if people say it is important when asked, it might not seem vital to them, and they might not be willing to support arts education in practice.
So many people don't fully realize the importance and just how necessary arts education is. Everything around you from the chair you're sitting at, the car you drive, the movies you watch, the books you read, the good food you eat, the cellphone you use, the video games you play, the clothing you wear-- EVERYTHING was designed by somebody who most definitely had arts education training growing up. Funding for the arts is an age old issue and an issue that is no stranger to anybody in the arts community. Going to high school on Long Island, NY at a place called Herricks, I was very lucky and had a school which supported the arts and had a relatively decent amount of funding compared to other high schools on Long Island. Other typical Long Island high schools poured this extra money into athletics over the arts, arguing that the arts had no value. Now, I'm not saying that athletics aren't a worthy part of a well-rounded education, but I am saying that if it came down to it, arts education is more valuable as a life skill than sports are. Besides the two natural basic instincts humans have (reproduction and survival), artistic expression is the only other category that has been part of human civilization ever since humans have roamed the earth. We create and grow as a civilization because of the arts and the creative flow and experimentation that arises from it. If records of art have been dated back to the Neolithic Ages, there's not one argument that can possibly say that art is not an intrinsic part of our species.
I definitely think that arts education is not valued as much as other areas of education, and this is happening not only here in the US. I was actually surprised (and glad) to see that the surveys actually received support for arts education. However, I don't think this attitude is reciprocated by a lot of educational institutions - a lot of people don't see the arts as a viable career and stop valuing it pass K-12 and I wonder what the results would be if the same survey was given to schools. If schools are short on money for their math/athletic programs (which is unlikely to happen), they probably won't shut it down the way they do to their arts programs. If a school doesn't treat the arts seriously, its students/parents probably won't too. Hopefully once institutions realize how much people actually support the arts, their attitude towards it will change.
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