The Arts

Art Education helps us develop critical thinking skills and a sense of shared experience (empathy).

Brian Kasida & Daniel Bowen, Brookings:

Engaging with art is essential to the human experience. Almost as soon as motor skills are developed, children communicate through artistic expression. The arts challenge us with different points of view, compel us to empathize with “others,” and give us the opportunity to reflect on the human condition. Empirical evidence supports these claims: Among adults, arts participation is related to behaviors that contribute to the health of civil society, such as increased civic engagement, greater social tolerance, and reductions in other-regarding behavior. Yet, while we recognize art’s transformative impacts, its place in K-12 education has become increasingly tenuous.

A critical challenge for arts education has been a lack of empirical evidence that demonstrates its educational value. Though few would deny that the arts confer intrinsic benefits, advocating “art for art’s sake” has been insufficient for preserving the arts in schools—despite national surveys showing an overwhelming majority of the public agrees that the arts are a necessary part of a well-rounded education.

Gee - I wonder why "conservatives" are always trying to cut back on what the arts can do for us.

Maybe it's because the problems we love to bitch about - poverty, crime, ignorance, tribalism, the degeneration of civil discourse, etc - can be at least partly attributed to the erosion of the skills we need, but don't get to learn about anymore, because Republicans keep shitting on the arts by cutting the funding.

And maybe those problems are due to deliberate efforts to cause the problems, blame it all on "the other", and then trade on that disinformation to gain ideological advantage and political power.

The GOP Playbook, Page 1:

1. Fuck something up
2. Wait
3. Point at it and say, "Whoa, look - it's fucked up."
4. Run for office by promising to fix it
5. "Fix" it by contracting the solution out to your pals
6. Collect "contributions" from those pals
7. Get re-elected as a "Problem Solver"
8. Start again at #1 above

- and -

We find that a substantial increase in arts educational experiences has remarkable impacts on students’ academic, social, and emotional outcomes. Relative to students assigned to the control group, treatment school students experienced a 3.6 percentage point reduction in disciplinary infractions, an improvement of 13 percent of a standard deviation in standardized writing scores, and an increase of 8 percent of a standard deviation in their compassion for others. In terms of our measure of compassion for others, students who received more arts education experiences are more interested in how other people feel and more likely to want to help people who are treated badly.

When we restrict our analysis to elementary schools, which comprised 86 percent of the sample and were the primary target of the program, we also find that increases in arts learning positively and significantly affect students’ school engagement, college aspirations, and their inclinations to draw upon works of art as a means for empathizing with others. In terms of school engagement, students in the treatment group were more likely to agree that school work is enjoyable, makes them think about things in new ways, and that their school offers programs, classes, and activities that keep them interested in school. We generally did not find evidence to suggest significant impacts on students’ math, reading, or science achievement, attendance, or our other survey outcomes, which we discuss in our full report.