Time and again history has taught us the important role ‘the arts’ have held in shaping our society and culture.
In the gloomy flicker of neolithic cave fires, our neanderthal ancestors etched the roaming beasts of prehistoric Earth on the limestone walls of their holy ritual sites. In the Middle Ages, cowled monks, having sequestered their lives to worship, would sing together each morning, in witness to the glory of a breaking dawn. And long before novels were taken on summer holidays and sold in airport terminals, they were banned and burnt in streets for spreading ideas at odds with the strictures of their day.
But whilst it might be easy to measure the arts’ importance from the vantage of history, it might be trickier, at first, to calculate its significance in our children's’ curriculum. After all, the essence of a brush stroke cannot be calculated with the equations of Maths, nor can the meanings, pleasures, and challenges of a poem withstand the ‘fact’ finding of scientific inquiry.
And so we — parents, tutors, and students, all – might be left to wonder…
Why are the arts so important to our curriculum?
For all the indeterminacy of the arts – which is to say, the literary arts, the performing arts, and the visual arts – studies and investigations by leading national and international institutions have found a plethora of reasons to treasure their value in our school curriculum.
Individual Creativity and Self-Expression
In last year’s Ofsted review, the Chief Inspector for Education highlighted that making and studying art triggers important skills like innovation, imagination, and thought – all things societies like ours need in order to evolve and break new ground across sectors and industries and keep up with the most voracious economies around the world.
But besides the economics, this has personal significance as well.
As we slide deeper into the age of algorithms and artificial learning, perhaps the best weapon our children can have against an increasingly corporatized ecosystem, will be an ability to think creatively, and imaginatively as individuals. And one of the best ways to learn self-expression is through the arts.
Artworks, whether an aria, a diptych or a play, are great testing sites for exploring different experiences and alternative meanings, encountering problems of behaviour or ethics, which our students and children can think through, to understand and appreciate how other people in cultures and societies, besides our own, experience the world; as well as learn how we might want to navigate the complications of that world for ourselves.
Communication and Collaboration
But the value of the arts isn’t all about the individual — it’s also about how we can better work and communicate with each other.
A high-quality curriculum in art, craft and design, can enable students to raise their confidence, leadership, and team-building skills. Think about a school play. Beside the flood-lit dramatis personae, you have set designers, techies, directors, musicians, ushers, and not to mention the bonhomie that comes after opening night.
Which leads me to our third point...
Happier and Healthier Students
Studies have shown that young people’s confidence and motivation, encouraged by an arts curriculum, in turn helps to improve well-being and school attendance. Using sticky glue and paint to make things — as well as make mistakes – raises our children's’ enjoyment and engagement levels. Helping them to learn through error and improvement has a knock on effect across the curriculum as a whole. Arts Council England has found cross-curricular learning helps improve well-being, as well academic outcomes, particularly in reading and mathematics scores. But what a good arts programme adds up to, really, is equipping our students with the tools to meet a diverse and ever-evolving world.
In order for our children to meet the demands of the world they need the tools to make sense of it. And the arts, as an integral part of the curriculum, will equip students with cultural knowledge and understanding that will enable them to make sense of the world around them, and better understand their place within it.
Now…
That’s not bad for a silly little poem, is it?
Blog Post Crafted by Will
William read English Literature at Cambridge University. He wrote plays for the ADC Theatre, winning the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Other Prize in 2015.
He studied for an MSt in Creative Writing at Oxford University, before moving to New York City, completing an MFA in Fiction at Columbia University as a Chair’s Fellow.
Passionate about literature, Will loves to share his passion for reading and writing with the students he tutors.
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