The arts and education

The arts and education is
The Arts and Education
The Lack of Art programming in public schools
Background
The arts are languages that people embrace cutting across racial, cultural, social, educational and educational barriers, enhancing cultural appreciation and awareness. There have been many attempts in recent years to reinstate art education in the public school system due to limited hands-on learning in classes being available after elementary school. Co-director of Project Zero at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, Dr. Howard Gardner, developed a theory suggesting North American public schools reflect a culture to teach, test, reinforce and reward only verbal and logical-mathematical intelligence. However, there are at least five other kinds of intelligence equal importance called “languages.” Languages include visual/spatial, bodily/kinesthetic, auditory/musical and intrapersonal intelligence. Students today have very little opportunities to experience processes from beginning to end due to lack of visual aids, often only seeing end productions on social networks or video game store shelves.
Research constructed by Neuroscientist Marian Diamond at Berkeley states the human brain can change structurally and functionally because of learning and experience. Neural connections that conduct learning, remembering, problem solving and creativity can continue to form throughout life in environments that are stimulating and encourage action and interaction, opposite from the lack of formation due to rigid environments where connections are the passive recipients of information. The arts make it possible for all students to learn effectively, retain what they have learned and know how to apply what they have learned in a variety of contexts. The discipline of understanding how to complete an idea from thought through the process of experimentation and improvement into a visual product is itself a meaningful learning experience. Artistic experiences provide the necessities for students to understand and consolidate what they learned. According to studies by Diana Deutsch at the University of California, Hungary ranked first and the United States ranked fourteen out of seventeen nations in a survey of science achievements. Hungary’s success is due to its intensive art programming with instruction starting at the kindergarten level. The human brain has a visual cortex that is five times larger than the auditory cortex. Students are evolving in a visual world surrounded by images from video games, advertising displays and other media outlets.
In Nancy Welch’s School’s Communities and the Arts: A Research Compendium, at least fifty research projects were conducted attempting to prove that arts education is valuable and necessary for students to reach full potential. Carolyn Hudspeth, who studied two fourth grade language arts classes of low achievers, completed one study. Each class was from a different school with equal socio-economic and achievement levels. One class was taught with the SAMPLE method (Suggested Activities and Poetry for Language Enrichments) while the other class was taught a traditional language arts program. SAMPLE classes outperformed the traditional class by five years in language mechanics and 2.7 years in total language. The College Entrance Examination Board announced recently that students who studied arts and music scored significantly higher than the national average on Scholastic Aptitude Tests.
Situation Analysis
Every school has a growing diversity of students with different cultural, social, and economic backgrounds that result in different ways of thinking, learning and behaving. The arts contribute to the development of human intelligence and offer the means to reach diversity of every single student. School systems that rely on teaching primarily through spoken and written word do not reach all kinds of students. In many classrooms, there are different languages spoken, diverse abilities and disabilities, along with different economic backgrounds. The arts improve academic achievement by enhancing test scores, social skills, and attitudes along with critical and creative thinking. Barry Oreck of ArtsConnection and Susan Baum from the College of Rochelle observed integrated arts lessons in all major subject areas in fourteen New York City elementary and middle public school classrooms, concluding that student behavior improved remarkably in areas such as taking risks, cooperating, solving problems being prepared and taking initiative for learning.
There has been effort to justify the importance of supporting artistic training throughout cognitive development. It is as fundamental and needed as math and writing to the development of the human brain. Artistic experience exercises the ability to hold together memory anticipation and subsequent behavior. Cognitive skills are cyclical and move around the brain starting in one hemisphere continuing to the other hemisphere leading to bilateral parallel processing. Cognitive improvement depends on both hemispheres of the brain. It is imperative to continually expose students to the arts throughout development because the increase of cognitive skills depends on the cycling activity between both of the brains hemispheres. The arts provide the means for every student to learn.
Core Problem
The human brain is the most complex system on Earth, and is often used in schools primarily as a simple device for storage and retrieval of information.

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