Indispensable Arts: First Comes the Child

By Carol Ann Goodson and Debora Escalante

Among the most accomplished and fabled tribes of Africa, no tribe was considered to have warriors more fearsome or more intelligent than the mighty Masai. It is perhaps surprising, then, to learn the traditional greeting that passed between Masai warriors: “Kasserian Ingera.” It means “And how are the children?”

In a 1991 sermon, Rev. Dr. Patrick T. O’Neill explained:

It is still the traditional greeting among the Masai, acknowledging the high value that the Masai always place on their children’s well-being. . . . “All the children are well” means that life is good. It means that the daily struggles of existence do not preclude proper caring for their young.¹

The educator’s mission must be to help each child become strong in body, mind, and spirit, thoroughly prepared to build a life of joy and purpose. Every day instruction must be centered on leading a child to wholeness. The purpose of this article is to advocate first for the children and second for the use of arts instruction as part of a “whole education”—to ensure that all our children are well.

Janet Eilber, artistic director at the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, well remembers when she heard prominent pediatrician Mel Levine point out that “the most difficult thing a child has to learn in kindergarten is to sit still and be quiet.” Eilber went on to say of that experience:

Neuroscience tells us that much important learning happens between birth and the sixth birthday. Early learning is all experiential. . . . It’s quite the opposite of sitting still and being quiet. One wouldn’t teach a baby to crawl by holding him gently and carefully explaining how the body’s motor mechanisms work.

Infants and toddlers experiment with balance, locomotion and spatial relationships. They identify, imitate and communicate using sound and gesture. They respond to visual stimuli and clues. In this way, we all start out as fledgling dancers, actors, musicians and artists.

Eilber continued, emphasizing the obvious disconnect:

No wonder “sitting still and being quiet” is so difficult and discouraging for many young learners. We are being asked to abandon approaches to learning with which we have had great success.²

Indispensable Arts

Dance, music, theatre, and visual arts have been long established as core subjects essential to the education program. Art policy researchers Nick Rabkin and Robin Redmond declare, “It’s time to stop thinking about the arts as fluff. They make schools better places to learn, and they raise student achievement.”³

From the arts come spectacular transformations for students who are disadvantaged by socioeconomic factors, language barriers, and other circumstances. Studies consistently show that arts experiences have the greatest impact in strengthening disadvantaged learners. Music specialist Trish Wade teaches violin in a Title I elementary school where an experiment has been in process for over 15 years. Every teacher and student receives music instruction, mainly through Wade’s violin classes, every day. Wade explains:

Since the inception of the music program, our school has significantly decreased its mobility rate and significantly increased student attendance. Parent attendance at parent-teacher conferences has shot up to an average of 97 percent. Students hardened by gang activities have begun to recognize and allow themselves to have feelings other than anger or false happiness caused by drugs or gangs, and student behavior referrals have decreased dramatically. By the way, the original objective—to see if art would raise test scores—has also been achieved.⁴

Economic and political issues have eclipsed the basic human needs they should be protecting. The Center on Education Policy “found that a majority of districts surveyed—71 percent—reported having reduced instructional time in at least one other subject to make more time for reading and mathematics, the topics tested for [No Child Left Behind] purposes.”⁵ But children’s developmental needs have not changed, and public opinion surveys continue to show high public value for a balanced educational program that includes a strong arts component. [See sidebar: Do Americans Value Imagination and the Arts?]

When even simple components of the arts are not taught properly in school, all children suffer. To illustrate, it may seem a harmless deficit at first if children do not learn to draw. But as Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, points out, the arts, including drawing, develop the right hemisphere of the brain, allowing students to see context and understand “big pictures.”⁶ With time, some students might regret not only the inability to draw but also their weak observations and their inability to communicate details. To develop skills to counter those tendencies, students need the opportunity to develop and use a variety of learning processes that include drawing.

Education for the Whole Child

A child’s test scores need to be seen as only one measure of the life skills needed as an adult. In the process of the child’s experiences in study, play, and giving back to others, teachers must help students learn how to teach themselves to be strong in mind, body, and spirit. This approach means being child-centered, not subject-centered, and it requires maintaining a vision of the life skills the child is building throughout all learning experiences. Each subject is of profound importance because of its contribution to the child’s development. In the arts, students discover new powers of mind and body as they experience aesthetic feelings. They find they can create personal meaning. This is one of the many reasons the arts, like math and reading, are indispensable in developing genuinely whole people.

Benefits of Arts Instruction

Through the arts children gain skills that are not easily measured. However, these skills are unique to the arts and essential for developing an aesthetic sense. Students learn how to think like a painter, a dancer, a composer, or an actor. They recognize, create, perform, and reflect on the subtle and obvious presence and organization of elements such as balance, contrast, rhythm, etc., that make up the meaning of the whole. Experiences with the arts sensitize individuals to the deeper meanings contained in all they experience. Learning to think like an artist expands the “vocabulary” of thought patterns and changes habits of mind. Arts researcher and author Elliot Eisner calls this developmental work and play the “creation of mind.”⁷

Leaders across the globe seek after people with strong arts backgrounds because this “creation of mind” is a strong developer of individual voice, effective communication, understanding of multiple points of view, collaborative attitudes, creative expression, and innovative thinking. Thomas Friedman, author of The World Is Flat, and numerous other prominent writers and economists predict that the need for these personal attributes will only increase.

Learning how to attend to the arts is also important. It cultivates an individual’s ability to perceive and be sensitive to elements of design and qualities of sound, movement, gesture, color, texture, rhythm, etc. Skills in perception amplify understanding and love for the art form. Elementary classroom teacher Chris Roberts shares the following:

One of my first modern dance concerts was a Ririe-Woodbury concert. One of the pieces they did was about the coming down of the Berlin Wall. There were long pieces of cloth hanging down to the stage, and the dancers were moving in and around these. And then they began tearing these down. I don’t remember the details, but I certainly remember the emotions it brought up from deep inside me. I cried and cried right there. I was stunned at how these dancers created something that could do that to me.⁸

Collaborative activities in the arts nurture creative thinkers and provide a safe place in which to belong. As students become older, arts activities reduce the number of high school dropouts, contribute to higher SAT scores, increase the number of awarded scholarships, and allow for successful employment. For example, art teacher Dave Masters started a filmmaking class to reach out to the gangbangers in his California school and to give them a better place in which to belong. He reports that his students became so excited about filmmaking that he “could have been arrested for child abuse” if he had required students to work as hard as they did on their own. Many of these students landed positions in the movie industry right out of high school.⁹

Additionally, when USA Today made its annual selection of an all-star academic team of 20 outstanding high school seniors from across the country during 2003, 2004, 2006, and 2007, 73 percent of these students had extensive backgrounds in one or more art forms.¹⁰

Put Arts Back into the Curriculum

The United States became a world leader by seeking what was necessary for children instead of what appeared “affordable.” We should not forget this. This country needs to reestablish a base of effective leaders, a broad spectrum of local stakeholders, and a unifying long-range plan to form a healthy foundation for perpetual inclusion of arts education. Educators must also act with principles of leadership when weathering political and economic storms that erode arts instruction.

Alexander Morrison, a General Authority of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, observed:

In caring communities, parents truly are concerned about the children in their midst—all children, not just their own. In this regard, the traditional greeting among the Masai . . . comes to mind: “How are the children?” to which the reply is, “All the children are well.”¹¹

Notes

1. Rev. Dr. Patrick T. O’Neill, senior minister, First Unitarian Association, Wilmington, Delaware, 1991 sermon delivered at the First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church in Framingham, Massachusetts; adapted by Rev. Pat Hoertdoerfer in “Sample Interfaith Reflection: “How Are the Children?” in Shannon Daley-Harris, Joining Hearts, Hands, and Voices to Leave No Child Behind: Worship, Educational, Community Outreach, and Advocacy Resources for Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Other Faith Traditions (Washington, D.C.: Children’s Defense Fund, 2000), 114.
2. Janet Eilber, “A Child’s First Method of Learning Is Still the Best,” Arts Education in the News (19 November 2007); www.dana.org/news/artseducationinthenews/detail.aspx?id=10102.
3. Nick Rabkin and Robin Redmond, “The Arts Make a Difference,” Educational Leadership 63, no. 5 (February 2006): 60. Nick Rabkin and Robin Redmond are the editors of Putting the Arts in the Picture: Reframing the Arts in the 21st Century. Rabkin is the executive director of the Center for Arts Policy at Columbia College Chicago, and Redmond is an associate director.
4. Trish Wade, music specialist, Jackson Elementary School, Salt Lake City School District, 2008, personal communication.
5. “Majority of School Leaders Report Gains in Achievement, But a Narrower Curriculum Focus Under No Child Left Behind,” www.cep-dc.org/_data/global/nidocs/CEPNewsRelease24March2006.pdf; see Diane Stark Rentner, “From the Capital to the Classroom: Year 4 of the No Child Left Behind Act,” Center on Education Policy; www.cep-dc.org/_data/global/nidocs/CEP-NCLB-Report-4.pdf.
6. See Daniel H. Pink, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future (New York: Riverhead, 2006).
7. See Elliot W. Eisner, The Arts and the Creation of Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
8. Chris Roberts, “How the Arts Have Affected Me,” fall 2007.
9. Dave Masters, previously a high school teacher who went to work for one of the movie studios in California, Utah Arts Council Conference, spring 1996, Salt Lake City.
10. Author Carol Goodson analysis.
11. Alexander B. Morrison, “No More Strangers,” Ensign, September 2000, 20; emphasis in original.