Finding Our Way

The Necessity of Arts Education

by John Domont

Arts education is about learning to think, create, and live in a whole brain manner. It is not just another subject. Arts education is the crucial doorway into our creativity, individuality, and the realms of human possibility. It is the key to empowering each of us to learn and grow from our internal as well as external selves. Arts education is the pathway for each of us to find our place of balance and individuality in society and with ourselves.1

Why are arts programs being dropped from school curriculums? Why do a limited number of people attend cultural functions in our cities? What is the ultimate and personal value of the Mayor‚s cultural initiative for Indianapolis? Where are we with our cultural and arts development as a society and as individuals?

We are young in our development and unskilled in our internal worlds. We are products of accumulated time and education yet not enough time and education. Through our educational processes, we have not yet arrived at a plateau of whole brain learning, inner integration, and function.2 We have not yet learned the magic of our internal selves or how to use the arts as the developmental pathway to these unknown parts of our lives. We look at our internal world from a left-brain perspective, we look at the arts as subjects, and like everything else that we do with left-brain thinking, we label, box, and bury them. The arts are living doorways to and from our souls. The arts are the birthing ground of consciousness.

We have not yet learned to come to terms with our right brain and the way that this part of ourselves perceives differently from the objective world, which surrounds us. According to Dr. Akter Ahsen, “We do not need to develop our right or our left brain, rather we need to learn to develop our skills of utilizing and integrating both hemispheres.”3 We need to learn to use our internal tools in order to make healthy and creative choices for our externally productive lives as well as for our peace and stability.

There are many ways one can approach and look at the arts. In the end, however, we must always have some contact with that fuzzy unknown part of ourselves, the right brain.4 Moreover, right and left must learn to connect and communicate authentically to and from the deeper, emotional brain.5 Only then will the brain function as a “whole.” This is in part the creative, forming and indomitable part of ourselves. “Artists are out there” ... and children being scared of the dark are both cultural inheritances that show our uncomfortable nature with the internal unknown.

Art is not about decoration. The purpose of arts education is not just to learn to draw or play a tune or write a poem, just as the purpose of scientific education is not just to calculate. If calculation were all science was after, we would have no technological advances. The purpose of training and education is to allow for creative productive response for individuals and the whole of civilization. Where do those advances come from? The imagination is the obvious answer. The imagination is the home of inspiration and the birthing ground of our magical connection to the cosmos. The imagination lives in the dark, unknown, uncharted part of ourselves born out of emotion. For this very reason the human being will always be the final frontier. There is no end to human creativity and the birthing of individuality as we collectively evolve.6

Arts education must begin to recognize the living quality and power of our internal images and their direct link to our feeling selves. The young people at Columbine High had hung on to images of pain and anger, which no one perceived or took the time to diffuse. This is true of their parents, teachers, and religious contacts. This is not a blanket condemnation of our structure and educational system. This is a matter-of-fact statement about our present status as a species in regard to how much we have learned and not yet learned about being human. We are still scared of the dark and we are still confused as to the purpose, usefulness, and power of the arts as the vehicle for whole-brained human development.

Both our fear and unskilled internal development will be resolved in time: In the time it will take us to learn how to learn, in the time it will take us to learn how to allow our internal images to talk to us, in the time it will take to learn how to integrate these images, and the feelings and the outcomes associated with them. In the time that it will take to learn how to make creative choices for ourselves, and the world we share. In the time it will take us to trust what births itself in us in the form of images, creative concepts, and other expressions of imagery, inspiration, and imagination. It will take as much time for us to come to balance as it does for us to learn the value and tools of our imaginations, inspirations, and images, and the way to integrate these pathways through creative choices. Arts education is ultimately about this very purpose and it is the social and educational vehicle that will allow us to make these advances.

Let‚s bet on history. Of course, we do not know for sure what is the best education for children to ensure that they will grow up to lead productive and happy lives. The arts have been around longer than the sciences; cultures are judged on the basis of their arts; and most cultures and most historical eras have not doubted the importance of studying the arts. Let‚s assume, then, that the arts should be a part of every child‚s education and treat the arts as seriously as we treat mathematics or reading or history or biology. Let‚s remember why societies have always included the arts in every child‚s education. The reason is simple: The arts are a fundamental, important part of culture, and an education without them is an impoverished education leading to an impoverished society. Studying the arts should not have to be justified in terms of anything else.

Artists reach out with faith, hope, fear, and bravery confronting themselves and their unknown, our unknown. We are all in the same evolutionary frame: learning to learn, learning to share and experience our world together. Sometimes this is pleasant and, since 9/11, not so pleasant. Artists are heroes and visionaries who search the dark and unknown recesses of themselves, looking for paths to joy, peace, and human integration for themselves and others.

Endnotes:

  1. Greene, Maxine. (1995). Releasing the Imagination. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, pp.149-150. “To feel oneself en route, to feel oneself in a place where there are always the possibilities of clearings, of new openings, this is what we must communicate to the young if we want to awaken them to their lived situations and enable them to make sense of and to name their worlds.”
  2. National Endowment for the Arts. Effects of Arts Education on Participation in the Arts. (Research Division Report #36). “Arts education was the strongest predictor of almost all types of arts participation... Those with the most arts education were also the highest consumers and creators of various forms of visual art music, drama dance, or literature.”
  3. Dr. Akter Ahsen is the current president of The International Association of Mental Imagery and is the editor of The Journal of Mental Imagery.
  4. Gazzaniga, Michael. (1999). The Split Brain Revisited. Scientific American, Inc. New York: Lyons Press.
  5. Goldman, Daniel. (1995). Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. New York: Bantam.
  6. Keyes, Margret F. (1983). Inward Journey Art As Therapy: La Salle Ill.: Open Court Publishing, p.58. Jung, in describing the process of inner discovery, through constructing a mandala said, “This symbol finally contains the innermost god-like essence of man. It stands for the deity as well as the self since it reflects the image of the godhead in the unfolded creation in nature and in man.”