Art in Public Education

My presentation explored the past, present, and future roles of art in modern education. It focused on the current tragedy that art is disappearing from public schools and propose a solution through reintroducing creative thinking in the classroom. I was drawn to this subject initially because I am taking Dan Faulk's Political Science class, which pretty much says it all. His whole class is modeled on the fact that our education system is broken and needs to be fixed. In the T.A. session, we watched a number of TED talks and videos that discussed the role of art in public education and I decided to start looking into the matter further. It was really interesting to see how arts education started and how it got to where it is now, not to mention this all tied in with what we were reading in Ellen D. about a "new aestheticism." All the cards were kind of pointing in the same direction and I didn't feel like I wanted to do a presentation about an art form, but rather something relevant to our everyday lives as students and human beings in the modern world. 


Like I said, I began with these videos and the book the Element, recommended to me by a friend of mine. The Element, written by Sir Ken Robinson, is all about arts education and finding your element in which you excel. I found it extremely inspiring and began to look into journal articles about federal policy, creativity, imagination, art, and public schools. I had originally intended to interview artists and a couple of school teachers, as well as one of my peers, but I had difficulty getting ahold of people and confirming an interview time. I ended up being able to conduct an interview with one teacher, an HSU alum, through email for which I have great gratitude. My research didn't contradict my thesis that schools  are killing creativity and arts education is disappearing, but it did surprise me that there are a number of people trying to bring the arts back. At this point, I found a lot of evidence for after school programs and supplemental activities, which is all great. But art still isn't integrated fully into the classroom yet at the level it should be. 


If I were going to do a follow up research question, I would be interested in looking at specifically what people are doing to bring the arts back into schools. While I did come across a few great examples, I think this would be a nice way to follow up the problem with solutions. Another interesting thing would be to look at how the "new aestheticism" has affected the global culture rather than just that within the United Stated. What is the role globally of arts education? Or are there certain countries who have an education model that we can emulate? Maybe this would propose yet another group of solutions for fixing this broken education system.