Let’s Talk About Art Did you know…

 When you read this article it will be in April, but I want you to know that the month of March was the National Arts in Education Month. Arts-in-Education refers to these areas of learning in the public schools which are dance, drama, visual arts, music instruments, vocal, video production, photography, architecture, city planning, environmental design, visual literacy, and stage design.  It is important for the school officials, teachers, school board, parents and community to understand why the arts are important in the lives of people and their place in our culture.
The issue is not that music or painting or any single art should be loved by everyone, but rather all children should have the opportunity to know as wide a range and variety of forms of expression in the arts as possible. This is regarded as an obligation of public education to provide rich experiences in the arts for all children regardless of economic conditions. Federal government gives to the arts. The arts are not just something we find in museums, art galleries and concert halls or in old cities like Florence or Rome. Art and inspirations for the arts are present in everything we make to please our senses.
So what is the value of the arts as an educative medium? To answer this we need to ask, “What is Art?” There have been many answers to this, but never to everybody’s satisfaction. The arts are these things like air or soil that are everywhere around us, but which we rarely stop to consider. The arts are not seasonal, they are not for a specific time of the day or year, they are part of the flow of life that overlaps and merges on one thing into another.  We can say that common to all works of art is something we call “form”. This is a quite simple short word and it has a meaning familiar to everyone.
If someone plays well or runs well, or does something well we say that he or she is in “good form”. The form of a work of art is the shape it has taken. It does not matter whether it is a building, or a statue, a picture, a poem, or a sonata, all these things have taken on particular or “specialized” shape and that shape is the form of the work of art. Therefore we can see that we are surrounded by works of art daily, from the clothes we wear, homes we build, cars we drive, music we hear, and many other environments created by people where we work and are involved with daily. Everything around us that has been created by people is some art form, except nature and nature is the inspiration for the arts! Teachers, school boards, and school officials, must be convinced that the arts are as basic as reading because the images are central to our lives and need to be central to a successful educational system. It is curriculum directors, administrators and teachers who must re-examine the school curriculum to discover and utilize the areas of cognition which are relevant to the arts and the potential for students to receive a formal structured education in the arts.