Preserving and sustaining fine arts programs in our schools during this period of economic crisis will be critical for many children across the United States. The economic recession we are experiencing has left state education agencies staring at massive funding deficiencies and has had a catastrophic affect on the support many school districts can provide to their fine arts programs. This has happened in many states and districts across the country and it may get worse. As state education budgets, already cut to the bone, shrink even further, many decision makers responsible for maintaining curricula offerings may be tempted to marginalize or remove funding from existing fine arts programs vital to the creative and imaginative growth of children.
Children’s intellectual development is facilitated in most of the educational activities in today’s schools primarily by engaging linguistic and mathematical forms of intelligence with selected response questions and problems. Children spend much of their time in school completing paper and pencil work sheets designed to prepare them for high stakes testing events. Learning in most 21st Century classrooms today require children to place a high priority on information processing. I understand, it is the role of educational institutions to impart knowledge and skills upon our young learners. The problem is this: the human mind is hard wired to think and process a multitude of sensory information.
Fine arts programs are all about the senses and provide learning experiences where children are allowed to experiment, imagine, create and express personal ideas using a myriad of visual, kinesthetic and auditory forms of thinking. Much of fine arts education learning requires students to execute the steps to represent and convey ideas in two, three, or four dimensions. This requires individuals to develop the ability to focus their attention on a vast array of quality control details. The assembly of these qualities within an art work or performance requires a synchronization of consciousness with imagination and the sensory, emotive, kinesthetic and cognitive realms.
When learners actively interact and interpret information and are engaged in substantive mental operations with educational content, meaningful learning is achieved. Educational experience in the fine arts is emotionally connected, meaningful learning. Educators do not boast when claiming learning in the fine arts can lead to transformational change in their students.
Eric Kandel, Nobel Laureate in physiology (2000) revealed stimulating sensorial activity boosts long term memory formation in neurological structures by the extra production of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Neural networks are strengthened and expanded when learners are engaged in stimulating, meaningful experience that engages the senses. Significant strengthening of synaptic bundles and neural pathways throughout the brains of subjects who had musical training were reported by Stanley Greenspan and Stuart Shanker and reveal the potency of fine arts activities to increase the capacity for intellectual growth of the human mind.
Research of this kind provides strong evidence that fine arts experiences can lead to increased neurological development of the brain and the capacity to expand learning and memory capability. It turns out fine arts learning is to the human mind what cardio vascular exercise is to the human heart. The hands, eyes, ears and body are the agents of cognitive growth.
A steady diet of standardized test prep, where students are reduced to passive recipients of knowledge produces learning experiences unsatisfactory to many learners and are inadequate for preparing children for the challenges we face in the 21st century. Fine arts programs matter in our schools because children thrive in school environments where they have access to these learning experiences.
It is important for President Obama and his administration to consider stepping in to shore up educational funding deficiencies before millions of American school children are left behind vital cognitive growth opportunities in the fine arts.
We cannot afford future failures of imagination.