Core Values for Arts Education in the 21st Century

I came across this YouTube video of Senator Barack Obama speaking in Wallingford, Pennsylvania on the importance of the arts in education. What other presidential candidate has devoted this much time to speaking this insightfully on the arts? Subtract the arts from education and we are raising up a generation without any in-depth training in practices of innovation.

Parents, teachers, and educational policy-makers need to reconsider our continuing and persistent devaluation of the arts in education. As the new Chair of Art Education at Syracuse University, I am exploring possibilities and feeling out directions as if I were marking out a figure drawing on newsprint with a piece of charcoal blackening my fingertips. I would like to sketch out some new ideas on what the core values for arts education in the 21st century might otherwise be...especially since what many of us are adhering to right now hasn't exactly made the impression we need!

Arts practices ought to be:

• Informational
Studio arts based methods for organizing data about the human experience are systems of information pressed into handmade artifacts, manufactured forms, cultural symbolism, and critical lenses. The visual arts inform human beings of who we are, where we come from, what our purpose is, and where we are going.

• Educational
Because the arts are informative, they are also inherently instructional, aiding overall academic achievement; basic to higher thinking skills, social skills, multiple literacies, and the motivation to learn; and a natural arena for the integration of knowledge, the inclusion of all learners, and the comprehensive asset-development of school and community.

• Transformational
Because the arts are educational, they are also inherently transformative, developing imaginative and practice-based habits of innovation, a capacity suggested by educational philosopher John Dewey, one that enables a student to learn from experience in the process of “trying and discovering, modifying and adapting” (Cuffaro, 1995, p. 19).

James Haywood Rolling, Jr., Ed.D.