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Cost Of Art Education

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Pablo Picasso once said "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up." Think about this, when a child is young they are given crayons and paper to occupy their time; mothers sing to their babies or play them classical music. From a young age we are taught to create, and we really are all artists. We create until creation is deemed nonessential, and the art projects we work into our everyday routine are demoted to electives. "Funds for Education have been cut in over 80% of U.S. schools in the last 10 years, and the first programs to leave are often art education." Harvard President Drew Faust recently wrote. The same classes we as a nation are deeming unnecessary are mandatory in countries that rank consistently …show more content…

Twyla Tharp, a dancer and artist once said "Art is the only way to run away, without leaving home." Her point was proven when a study done by National Endowment confirmed that low-income high school students who earned little to no arts credits were five times more likely to drop out of high school than low-income students who earned many arts credits. Students that come from rough neighborhoods or bad homes can find an escape through art classes, if they're provided the outlet. Not only do students enrolled in Art Education have a more likely chance of graduating, they score better on college entrance exams. Students who took 4 years of art classes scored approximately 91 points higher on the SAT exam than those who took a half a year or less. Art class not only keeps these students in school, but it helps them go on in their schooling and achieve a higher education. If it has been proven that the arts have an effect on our students, why are we continuing to demote and defund them? My opponent might argue that the correlation between art enrolled students and how well these students do in school is low; however a neuroscientist, Michael Gazzaniga proved this incorrect. In a study asking "Are smart people drawn to the arts or does arts training make people smarter?", a "clear benefit" was found with kids trained in the arts, versus kids that weren't given the …show more content…

School System needs to stop defunding art programs because art is important in our history. Without art, we would have less interpretation of our history. In any history class we study the artists of each time period and how they interpreted their times. Most of what artists do is tell stories, they help us make sense of the world. It can connect us to the past, present and the future. Throughout history our greatest minds have often merged discovery and art, the geniuses we learn about in history aren't only math matachins or scientists, but artists on top of that. Einstein stressed the importance of having a creative mind, once saying "I'm enough of an artist to draw freely from my imagination, which I think is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." Without art we would have a much more narrow view of our past, and future generations will have a narrow view of our current events. Sure, you could say that we still have a history without art; but without photos, paintings, and sculptures would we really fully grasp our past? By cutting our generation off from art education we are cutting off future generations from learning too. Without artists to document our history, our great grandchildren will be without that connection to what's going on today. While art connects us to the past, and the world's history, it connects us to so much

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