What the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities Says About Arts Education
- Research in multiple intelligences, the brain, and how the emotions strongly effect learning, supports hands-on, experiential learning through the fine arts.
- A quality fine arts education program provides students opportunities to acquire basic skills in kinesthetic, musical, spatial, and visual intelligence, applicable to learning in all other subject areas.
- Almost all of the information we receive in the learning process is acquired kinesthetically, auditorally, and visually.
- The fine arts help children better understand concepts measured on the TAKS tests. The fine arts "essential knowledge & skills" correlate with, support, and reinforce reading, language arts, science, and math. They help teach shapes, color recognition, size differentiation, letter and number recognition, phonic recognition, sequencing, following directions, hand eye and motor coordination, kinesthetic and spatial relationships, and direction and location.
- The fine arts develop valued higher order and creative thinking skills such as memory, various forms of communication, and the ability to compare and contrast, group and label, explain cause and effect, assess significance, make predictions, and frame and test hypotheses.
- The fine arts improve many students' self-concepts and self-actualization, attitude towards school and, as a result, the students' attendance improves, and the special needs of the "at risk" student are met.
- Research shows not only that the fine arts are beneficial in themselves, but also that their introduction into a school's curriculum causes marked improvement in math, reading, science and other subjects.
- The College Board reported that SAT scores are considerably higher for students involved in the arts, and that the fine arts are key to student success in college. Test scores, attendance, and college entry are higher, and drop-out rates are lower, in arts-centered schools in Texas.
- The fine arts are vastly important to technology and multimedia production, as evidenced in their use in books, magazines, advertisement, television commercials, music videos, video games, and blockbuster films such as Jurassic Park, Twister, Toy Story, Mission Impossible, Independence Day, Space Jam, Lost World, Men in Black and Titanic.
- The arts generate over $300 billion annually as an industry! The arts represent 6% of the Gross National Product (GNP).
Source-National Assembly of State Arts Agencies