Art Education

Longtime readers and personal friends of TAE know that Mrs. TAE is finishing up her studies to be a Middle School Art Teacher. Regardless of that, TAE has always had a tender spot in his heart for The Arts. Although I scoff at Pollock (mostly for the satisfaction of watching my wife twitch violently), there are so many painters, sculptors, architects, musicians, actors, and singers who have captured the free, random firings of the human mind - the side of the brain I so often have no ability to use - and turn it into an amazing expression of what I consider to be the shining gift of our species: our ability to create and enjoy activities that have no obvious evolutionary benefit. How many species of creatures on this planet hold concerts? How many go to art museums simply to stare at walls? Our species is bizarre. But I digress.
Jonah Lehrer points to and then expands upon this article by Posner and Patoine in which the authors argue that the while quantifiable results have potential gains for normal education (and by normal education I mean "core curriculum"), they hurt Arts education that does not have clear quantifiable results on a multiple-choice exam. However, Posner and Patoine point to some solid, trackable numbers emerging that defends the necessity of The Arts:

In 2004, E. Glenn Schellenberg of the University of Toronto at Mississauga published results from a randomized, controlled study showing that the IQ scores of 72 children who were enrolled in a yearlong music training program increased significantly compared with 36 children who received no training and 36 children who took drama lessons. (The IQ scores of children taking drama lessons did not increase, but these children did improve more than the other groups on ratings of selected social skills.)

In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience in March 2009, researchers Ellen Winner of Boston College, Gottfried Schlaug of Harvard University and their colleagues at McGill University used neuroimaging scans to examine brain changes in young children who underwent a four-year-long music training program, compared with a control group of children who did not receive music training.⁴ In the first round of testing, after 15 months, the researchers found structural changes in brain circuits involved in music processing in the children who received training. They did not find the same changes in the control group. The scientists also found improvements in musically relevant motor and auditory skills, a phenomenon called "near transfer." In this case, the improvements did not transfer to measures of cognition less related to music—termed "far transfer." We do not know why far transfer to IQ, for example, was found in the Schellenberg study and not in this one.

Posner and Patoine go on...and on. Their article is rich and compelling, and like Jonah I came away with a renewed feeling that the loss of Art Education in America will have long-term negative effects:

But I think that even this clinical evaluation of arts education misses an important benefit: self-expression. I shudder to think that second graders, at least in most schools, are never taught the value of putting their mind on the page. They are drilled in spelling, phonetics and arithmetic (the NCLB school day must be so tedious), and yet nobody ever shows them how to take their thoughts and feelings and translate them into a paragraph or a painting. We assume that creativity will take care of itself, that the imagination doesn't need to be nurtured. But that's false. Creativity, like every cognitive skill, takes practice; expressing oneself well is never easy.

Lehrer then makes an interesting point I had not considered: art is a method to teach concentration. A typical math problem may take a bright student mere seconds, a painting might take hours. Lehrer refers to this level of concentration as flow:

Finally, I think arts education, and the self-expression it encourages, can give children a tiny taste of an essential mental state: flow. First proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, flow is a condition of complete and effortless focus, characterized by total immersion in the task at hand. We don't notice the clock, or think about what we're eating for lunch - we're just thinking about what we're doing. (Not surprisingly, people are exceedingly happy while engaged in flow activities, be it composing a poem or constructing a Legos set.)

Children have an extraordinary natural capacity for flow. (I've always loved this Auden aphorism, which he adapted from Nietzsche: "Maturity - to recover the seriousness one had as a child at play.") Unfortunately, I think most school kids never experience a taste of flow at school. Instead, they are drilled in all the usual subjects, from arithmetic to reading. The downside of this pedagogy is that it leads kids to conclude that learning is a dry and tedious pursuit, where we will always count the minutes until recess. Perhaps arts education improves our attentional system because it shows children that attention isn't always hard work. Sometimes, we want to focus, because we enjoy what we're focused on.

You mean letting kids do art might increase their focus?

What are the odds that in today's society, when kids are increasingly portrayed as spastic and diagnosis of attention deficit disorder is on the rise, the cause of this isn't just the television or video games or bad parents, but the cause is also school axing art and music and drama in order to cram more science and english down students' throats? And the scary thought here is that none of that extra science may produce better engineers, it instead may, through omission of the arts, produce bad ones.


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