“Consider that 65% of the population are visual learners and 90% of the information that comes to the brain is visual. The brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text. Art education not only fills a critical gap in institutional learning, it also dovetails with the way in which we interpret the world.”
Kranzler (1999) 3M Corporation

“An arts education enriches children for the duration of their lives, teaching them curiosity, motivation and synthesis, adds educator Dee Dickinson, who heads New Horizons for Learning, a Seattle-based advocacy group with an international reach. But more than this, a solid foundation in the arts gives children a significant academic leg up.

Ellen Hart, a 25-year veteran teacher who heads the fine and performing arts department at Pentucket Regional High School in West Newbury, Mass., claims that students involved with the arts are typically at the top of their class in other subjects.

“The benefits are far beyond whether a student plays an instrument or paints a painting,” Hart says. “It’s an understanding, a discipline just like chemistry.”

Read more from Jill Oestreicher Gross in her article ‘What the Arts Really Teach Our Kids’.

“Education minus art? Such an equation equals schooling that fails to value ingenuity and innovation. The word art, derived from an ancient Indo-European root that means “to fit together,” suggests as much. Art is about fitting things together: words, images, objects, processes, thoughts, historical epochs.

It is both a form of serious play governed by rules and techniques that can be acquired through rigorous study, and a realm of freedom where the mind and body are mobilized to address complex questions — questions that, sometimes, only art itself can answer.”

Read more from Jeffrey Schnapp in Art in Schools Inspires Tomorrow’s Creative Thinkers.

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