What Arts adds to an Education

 What can a child gain by drawing?

Not all kids are good at drawing?

It's okay as a career for those who belong to economically affluent families, what good it would do to kids who are from poor families?

When schools are struggling to teach basic skills like numeracy and literacy, isn't art education a vanity?

Questions like these are commonly asked by teachers, education administrators, and, often, by parents as well. Even at the primary education level, the emphasis is on teaching kids that can help improve their earning potential in the future and art education doesn't appear to add any value to this quest.

But what if we tell that the primary purpose of art education can also be to improve the educational outcomes, which includes numeracy and literacy skill, of a kid. In this process, we can surely inspire some kids who grow up to become great painters, musicians, actors, etc, however, the intent remains to improve the educational outcome.

What is Art Education

Art education primarily consists of 3 areas: music, drawing & drama. At the level of primary education, it is to integrate these 3 as a medium of instruction to bring kids to school, retain their focus in a class, and to get better in academic studies.

How to Integrate Art education

Usually, arts, say drawing or music, is taught as a standalone skill. An instructor would draw a picture on the board and kids would usually copy it. This starts with basic figures and the complexity of drawing grows as kids go into higher classes. While this may improve the drawing skills, adds a dimension to the education and makes learning more fun, it doesn't offer close integration with other subjects.  

Instead of copying a drawing, encouraging kids to imagine and draw on a topic that is also part of their curriculum can be more beneficial. Topics are usually selected from the surrounding that kids can observe and relate to. For example, asking kids to draw about friends, local festivals, events, plants, cleanliness habits, etc. encourage them to be more observant. 

What Art Education Aims to Achieve

As outlined in this study, an art education aims to achieve the following: 

Student Achievement

•     Better performance in reading
•     Better performance in Mathematics

Motivation and Engagement

•     Improved Attendance
•     Persistence
•     Focused Attention
•     High educational aspirations
•     Intellectual Risk Taking

Habits of Mind

•     Problem Solving
•    Critical Thinking
•    Creative Thinking
•    Working with Others
•    Dealing with Ambiguity & Complexity
•    Integration of Multiple Skill Sets

Social Competencies

• Teamwork skills
• Social tolerance
• Self-confidence

All this may appear to be too vast to be covered only by art education. However, a simple exercise can illustrate the effectiveness of art education. 

Now, take a pause. Take a pencil and a paper & draw about your favorite room.  

What's included in the process?

1. Several images may have come to you
2. Out of those multiple images, the list reduced to 3-4 images
3. Out of these 3-4 images, you may have evaluated your current skills and the image you can draw
4. Though you weren't sure of the final product, you decided to give it a try
5. Once you started making a drawing, few things may not be as perfect as you would have liked or preferred, still, you continued and finished the drawing

Now from the above, the list, how many skills were involved in the process? A similar process works for the kids. When they make a drawing in which they aren't copying from a source, many skills from the above list are involved, developing these skills in the process. As many of you would have correctly found out that these skills are also involved and required in other subjects like Mathematics, English, Science, etc. All this in addition to making learning more fun, thus improving attendance in schools and increasing class participation.

A study of students in the United States found out that students who have high involvement in arts education perform better in subjects like mathematics, social science, English, etc along with reporting higher attendance and increased focus in the class. This effect of the increased performance in academics due to high involvement in arts was also found in the students belonging to poor socioeconomic background.

Arts for the art's sake is good. Arts for education's sake is even better. By including art education as an essential part of primary education, we will be creating future generations that aren't afraid of creating new things and for them, art is more than becoming an artist; it's a way to find their better selves.