Reflection: Why Teach Art?

"Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life"

-Pablo Picasso     

     Close your eyes and imagine school without art.  All I can see is  anything positive from my educational experiences as a child slipping away.  It a horrifying thought to me, as you so have imagined.  The authors of Emphasis Art, Robert D. Clements and Frank Waschowiak state it perfectly in their first chapter. "Art education fulfills many important functions of schooling.  Learning-and producing-art is a critical part of what our children need to be doing as they develop their awareness of the world around them".  And with ten very well thought out reasons Clements and Waschowiak bring truth to their above statement.  I'd like to bring those ten to light. 
     Why teach art?  Art, according to Clements and Waschowiak, brings: cultural understanding, national needs, making the ordinary important and special, personal communication and expression, general and artistic creativity, vocations, aesthetic awareness, literacy and cognition, a core participant in learning in school, and a different way of learning and communicating in school.
     It is this last reason that really strikes my fancy.  Art is important to teach because it is a different way of learning and communicating in school.  I couldn't agree more.  As important as the core academics are we sometimes intensify and pressurize them to much.  Among the arithmetic, science, and reading let us teach these kids to create with their hands.  Use their minds to discover and work though their very own masterpiece.
      In the book The Creation of Mind, this is illustrated perfectly when the author explains that we solve problems all too neatly in school, unfortunately this is not the way the world solves them.  "The implementation of means might lead to unanticipated effects that may be more interesting, promising, or problematic than the ones originally sought.  In such cases, and especially so in the arts, the individual takes his or hear lead from the work.  The work, so the speak, also speaks, and at times it is the artist who listens.  The work in progress begins to look more like a conversation than a lecture".   I think this is a great way of saying that an art piece is as unpredictable as life, and it needs to be figured out as you go.  One has to improvise and go where the decisions you've made lead you.  That is something that isn't learned though text or memorizing the times tables, it's a gained understanding that can be developed though art.  After all, in the words of Sir Ken Robinson (author and expert in creativity and innovation), "children have extraordinary capacities for creativity".  Let us teach them effective ways to express it and give them every opportunity to do so.