Importance of Arts Education

Is support for the arts literally dying off, as Judith Balfe suggested in her interview (Opinion, Feb. 25)? The answer is yes. Why would we expect otherwise when arts education has been systematically eliminated from school curricula across the nation?

As Balfe states, people need to be grounded in the arts before they will become a supportive audience. Yet a grounding in the arts doesn’t come from an annual bus trip to a museum or as an automatic consequence of growing up. It requires instruction to develop children’s capacities to create art and to expand their powers of perception, analysis and interpretation.

Arts education has an additional benefit that is often overlooked by our nation’s business leaders: It prepares children for the changing demands of tomorrow’s workplace. Companies say they want to hire people who can solve problems creatively, exercise judgment and communicate effectively both verbally and nonverbally. Those are exactly the qualities that arts instruction fosters.

Perhaps Richard Dreyfuss said it best at the Grammy Awards show on Feb. 28: “For hundreds of years, it has been known that teaching the arts, along with history and math and science, helps to create the well-rounded mind that Western civilization and this country have been grounded on. We need that well-rounded mind now because it is from that creativity and imagination that the solutions to our social and political problems will come.”

If support for the arts is to come from future generations, it is critical that their schooling include an education in the arts. Art is taught, not caught!

LEILANI LATTIN DUKE

Director, Getty Center for Education in the Arts