The Arts need to be put back in education.
Not instead of core subjects, but in the center of them or alongside them. Schools are not doing their students any good by marginalizing the arts. Author, speaker, and international advisor on education in the arts, Sir Ken Robinson, understands this, and in the TED talk “How Do Schools Suffocate Creativity?” and his interview “Educating the Heart and the Mind,” he addresses the way the arts spark personal growth and creativity in children and young adults. And creativity isn’t just for artists and musicians; it’s for engineers, mathematicians, and scientists. Creativity is needed desperately in every field, because innovation and discovery are results of creativity.
The Challenges: We tend to associate the arts as only recreational, as a means for self-expression rather than learning. It’s important to Robinson to show schools that this is a misrepresentation of how the arts work. The arts can and should be applied at all subjects, and even be at the heart of literature, math, science, and history. He explains that we have come to focus on our children as a “mind and a head,” rather than “people embodied.” Children need physical creative experiences and time to dwell in inner space where we are able find the things that make sense for us. Sciences are directed to understanding the external world through explanation and objectiveness, but standard education is poor at helping kids look inward. The role of the arts is to manage this relationship between the inner and outer world—not to explain it, but to describe a perception of it. We pay a high price for the exile of feeling and self-discovery in education. Robinson even describes teaching without creativity and then adding in a bit of creative thought at the end as saying, “We’ll bake the cake and if it’s nice enough, we’ll put the eggs in afterwards.”
Education is meant to take us to a future that we cannot yet grasp. Robinson emphasized the great task of a teacher: to prepare students for a world they will be living and working in for the next sixty-plus years. We are meant to teach them how to be successful in an ever-changing world that we ourselves cannot even imagine will be like in five years.
The Benefit: How are we supposed to account for unpredictability without a heavy weight on creative and resourceful thinking? This is a great benefit of the arts: they strengthen creativity in young minds and encourage its growth throughout their lives. You can be creative in anything touched by human intelligence, which includes all core subjects in school. Creativity gives children a desire to learn, fires up their imagination, and find things to read and to write that will be interesting. They are compliments, not conflicts.
John Hunter is an award-winning gifted teacher and educational consultant who has dedicated his life to helping children realize their full potential. Employing his background as a musician, composer, and filmmaker during a three-decade career as a teacher, Hunter has combined his gifted teaching and artistic talents to develop unique teaching programs using multimedia software programs in creative writing and film courses.
~World Peace Game Foundation
If not careful, adults can cloud children’s natural creativity. Because of this natural creativity and excitement to try new things, children have the capability to discover solutions to real problems. Educator John Hunter realizes this, and is giving students the chance to find their own solutions to current-day problems through the World Peace Game. Learn about the World Peace Game in the video below:
The World Peace Game may not be “art” by traditional definition, but it functions in a similar way. Art releases students’ ability to think creativity and never lose creative sparks or have it negatively manipulated. True understanding also comes from personal engagement – not through lessons and lectures in class – and art gives students that hands-on component that they need to learn efficiently. John Hunter’s creation also does these things, giving children the opportunity to learn beyond the boundaries of the core curriculum using their own innovative ideas and passions.
As a teacher, to be given that kind of open space, that kind of mandate-less position to be in where you can create out of the emptiness, it allowed me to create that kind of template for my students, where I could ask them, ‘What would YOU like to do today? What is your passion? What drives you?’ If the students have the interest and you build towards that, then they can come with more passion for learning.
~John Hunter at NBC’s Education Nation
Arts Integrated Practices in the Classroom 