Why the Arts are Important

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The arts address the whole child.

     The arts can enhance students in myriad ways, concrete and abstract.  The basic categories describe the growth and improvement of one's skills, attitudes, sensitivity, relationship with the environment (past and present) to create a Well Balanced Individual.

     The arts help develop individual skills:

• Hand-eye coordination
• Visual perception
• Manipulative and organizational skills
• Use of perceptual ability to collect sense data from and respond to the environment
• Ability to make discriminatory judgments based on personal expression
• Formation of mental images of things not present
• Cognitive knowledge of concepts, tools, techniques, materials, processes
• A well-integrated, visually-literate personality

     The arts help develop communications skills:

• Students develop the ability to communicate discriminatory judgments based on personal expression
• Students use diverse forms of communication to express human interaction
• The arts provide socially acceptable ways to communicate feelings and emotional responses

     The arts help develop creative problem-solving skills:

• Act as a catalyst for the discovery-making process
• Independent thinking and flexibility in problem solving
• Provide open-ended questions with multiple and diverse solutions
• Place value on unconventional responses
• Discovery of likenesses among seemingly unlike things

     The arts help students develop individual attitudes:

• Self discipline, self motivation/inspiration
• Individualism so that students appreciate their own strengths and weaknesses
• Self confidence in expressing thoughts and emotions to build self-reliance
• Emotional development
• Concern for long-range goals
• Individual responsibility
• Good work habits
• Care of tools
• Toward different art forms
• Toward self

     The arts help develop sensitivity:

• An aesthetic sensitivity
• An awareness of the value of aesthetic experience
• An appreciation of design, both as the artist and as the viewer or listener
• An acceptance of subjectivity, emotional and intuitive
• Toward discovery and inquiry
• Help foster pleasure in both learning and living
• Help foster a more sophisticated attitude toward art forms and a sensitive understanding of the functions of art in today's world

     The arts help students to be well balanced individuals

• Help foster an appreciation of the difference between life's complex and inter-relating elements and how to incorporate them into one's life
• Help foster new skill development, new solutions to problems, demanded by the materials one uses in the arts
• Help foster a broadened experience
• Through personal response

--Based on research completed by Kate Kosewicz

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