“Educators and administrators cannot justify giving the arts an important position in the currculum unless they understand that the arts are the most powerful means of strengthening the perceptual component without which productice thinking is impossible in every feild of academic study … What is most needed is a convincing case made for visual thinking quite in general. Once we understand in theory, we might try to heal in practice the unwholesome split which cribbles the training of reasoning power.” – Rudolf Arnheim (1904 – 2007)
- Art excites learners and keeps them curious to learn more.
- Art stimulates creative problem-solving, decision making skills, and critical thinking.
- Art promotes developmentally informed perception.
- Art helps promote self-dicipline, self-esteem, and self awareness.
- Art provide the possiblility for alternative ways of assessing students.
- Art build cooperative learning and develops multi-cultural understanding.
- Art can integrate all subject areas in a school
Source: Loyaccono, Reinventing the Wheel: A Design for Student Acheivement in the Twentieth Century.
Van James, the author of Drawing with the Hand, Head, and Heart writes, “Art is the meduim by which we play, create and feel – unfolding our emotional intelligence.” He notes, “just as the arts help children develop open minds, they also help open hearts.
Van James also writes, “This is what a disfunctional education looks like: an education that presses abstract intellectual learning too early in young, imaginative souls of children. Unfortunatly, this is for the most part the education of our time.
I am on a path to do school differently. Who is in on the adventure? Sasha
MaestraSasha 
So true – forcing abstract learning too young is bad for the child – bad for loving school and learning. Art engages all the senses – and the brain. Right on!
You are so right greeningteam! Our current commitment in the decisions we make about materials, interactions, curriculum, and instruction is NOT developmentally (age,individually and or culturally) appropriate is so many ways at the cost to us all. When I first became a teacher the five parts of literacy presented to me were: listening, speaking, reading, writing AND VISIONING. Where has the commitment to teaching our children to “vision” gone? Our current approaches to teaching and learning are not sustainable. It is dumbing down our future generations.