PERSPECTIVE ON EDUCATION : Arts, for the Thrill of Learning : Should our schools be teaching children how to take standardized tests, or igniting in them the passion of creativity?

We have managed to make education a hateful experience for a great majority of our children. For some reason, it has been decided that schoolwork should not be a pleasure. The arts, seen as pleasurable, unserious leisure activities, are therefore excluded from curricula, especially when money is scarce.

In the effort to teach the “basics,” we have made them the ends in themselves rather than the means toward an active, enriching intellectual life. For most students, school has become merely a place to prepare for standardized tests, for the transmission of information, where questions must have one correct, measurable answer or they shouldn’t be asked at all. For most teachers, overworked and underpaid, school has become a disciplinary and bureaucratic nightmare. There are pitifully few opportunities for inspiring connection with students. Well, as we all can see, it is not working.

While the arts are certainly no educational magic bullet, they must be part of the arsenal:

* The arts involve students in the process of their learning, demanding constant reflection and active participation.

* The arts enable students to collaborate toward a common purpose.

* The arts are a powerful connecting force between cultures and between disciplines.

* As our world and its problems become more complex, creative thinking becomes all the more important.

* And, yes, the arts are a pleasure. Work in the arts can often be painful in its constant personal inquiry, frustrating in the difficulties of mastery and interpretation and exhausting in execution. That’s pleasure? Profoundly so.

It is a little scary for teachers, students, parents and politicians to consider the arts as central to education. The arts are, by nature, ambiguous. They ask questions with no “right” answers and sometimes no answers at all. You cannot use a standardized test to measure ability. There is not enough “proof” that arts education improves academic performance. (Research is, in fact, providing such “proof.” And do we need more proof about the state of education without the arts?)

Artists themselves, while tolerated and sometimes idolized, tend to be seen as rather peculiar people (“talent,” in my computer’s thesaurus, has as one synonym “deviation”). Arts education brings to mind, for many, a vague, undisciplined, amoral, “touchy-feely” philosophy. There’s no money to be made in the arts anyway. And the terms self-esteem and empowerment send more than a few people running for cover.

But we must have the courage to make school a place for learning how to learn, not just what to know, and the will to encourage the joy of discovery, the thrill of an idea, the passion in creation. Learning is a lifelong enterprise; it had better be a pleasurable one.