How Important Is Arts Education?

It improves emotional balance and helps kids become team players. Art education helps improve decision-making, boosts self-confidence, and makes children more self-assured, as they learn about what appeals to them, and they directly influence how their final product will look. One of the most obvious benefits of art education is that it encourages creativity and engagement in a different way from what is usually taught in school. Instead of being fed facts they can explore their interests and indulge in what excites them the most. As students learn to read notes, compose music, play an instrument, memorize dance steps, create a painting, and act in a drama, they are also learning how to develop new concepts, build vocabulary and understand a new language.

Today's world is steeped in the Information Age. With all kinds of knowledge so readily available at our fingertips, it doesn’t matter what you know, but rather how you use what you know. Every academic and professional institution is looking for what you bring to the table in terms of ideas, innovation, and team-playing. A report by Americans for the Arts states that young people who participate regularly in the arts (three hours a day on three days each week through one full year) are four times more likely to be recognized for academic achievement, to participate in a math and science fair, or to win an award for writing an essay or poem than children who do not participate.