In case you needed to know more benefits of the arts- here are “Ten Things the Arts Teach Children,” from the book by Elliott Eisner, Beyond Creating: The Place for Art in America’s Schools. Enjoy!
1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative
relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers
and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that
prevail.
2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution
and that questions can have more than one answer.
3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons
is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving
purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity.
Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender
to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.
5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form
nor number exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not
define the limits of our cognition.
6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large
effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.
7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All
art forms employ some means through which images become real.
8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When
children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel,
they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will
do the job.
9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other
source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of
what we are capable of feeling.
10. The arts¹ position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young
what adults believe is important.
