What do the arts bring to education?

The music students at the high school at which I teach tell me that they like “mucking about” with other musician’s interpretations of classical music - a skill which could be seen by ill informed educators as time wasting. Mistakes and accidents are seen as sites for more meaning-making leading to unexpected and often successful results.

Self reflection is essential to art class critiques, as is evaluation of one’s own work and those of peers. Such judgments, “in the absence of rule”, are highly sophisticated mental endeavours according to Stanford University’s Elliot Eisner, a noted art education specialist.

In the instrumentalist and modernist national curricula, which is currently being adopted in Australia, these specific thinking skills are anathema to the educational bureaucrats of ACARA and to many parents unfamiliar with good arts education programs. These skills, which are sometimes seen as chaotic and messy, are far more difficult to measure through the type of generic testing carried out throughout our schools nationally. It is these skills that make a real and significant contribution to the lives of students and which will equip them to respond creatively to a rapidly changing world.

It is time to value these skills as well as acknowledging how obsessions with national testing or formal testing in general in schools can be destructive to a balanced educational system.