Arts education, that is. Recently in my area and in many surrounding ones, art education has been cut from public schools. Not fully cut, but it’s the first to get reduced funding and the first to become smaller in case of economic troubles. I think many of us agree that art education is important in a child’s life, so i won’t sit here and debate the benefits of it.
Instead, I’d like to share a remark that my little sister made the other day. She’s a fifteen-year-old sophomore in high school who’s always been an artist just like my mom. She loves her art classes and spends her free time drawing in her notepads or on her tablet. The other day, however, she was reading some transcendentalist poetry. Suddenly she stopped and looked up and launched into a explanation of how thankful she was for her knowledge of art. She said that if it wasn’t for this type of education that she got, she would have trouble understanding the words and not be able to appreciate the poetry as much as she does.
I was shocked when she said that. For a fifteen-year-old to identify her knowledge of art as such a big part of her success in reading poetry and communicating as a whole is incredible. We hear adults talk all about how important art is in childhood development, but hearing a kid discuss the personal benefits of her art education was awesome. She applied it to not only her ability to create, but her ability to understand and communicate. Communication is affected by countless areas of our lives. Our ability to interact with others is influenced by more than we initially know and understand, and we need to keep this in mind when we learn.
