"Six Good Reasons for Advocating the Importance of Arts in School": Kids learning the arts good for all of us?
Posted Mar 22 2011 12:00am
The benefits that accrue to children who learn how to draw, play an instrument, and practice other art endeavors are in the best interest of the futures of all of us, because that learning affects kids' abilities to be functional, thinking adults. Or so Jerome Kagan thinks. Take a look at this article and let me know what you think.
Excerpt:
Today’s middle-class parents worry too much about the child’s accomplishments in many domains. Some children interpret this intrusive concern as indicating that their achievements are necessary for the parent’s happiness. The combination of excessive parental worry over a child’s safety, achievements, and the restriction of their free time, together with television and the Internet which promote conformity to peer values, have impaired, to some degree, the integrity of the sense of agency that all children must develop. The opportunity to invest effort in the service of completing a drawing or musical performance that pleases the child might help children develop the personal agency that seems to me to be eroding.
A third advantage to an arts/music program, which might help all children, is based on the fact that
The benefits that accrue to children who learn how to draw, play an instrument, and practice other art endeavors are in the best interest of the futures of all of us, because that learning affects kids' abilities to be functional, thinking adults. Or so Jerome Kagan thinks. Take a look at this article and let me know what you think.
Excerpt:
Today’s middle-class parents worry too much about the child’s accomplishments in many domains. Some children interpret this intrusive concern as indicating that their achievements are necessary for the parent’s happiness. The combination of excessive parental worry over a child’s safety, achievements, and the restriction of their free time, together with television and the Internet which promote conformity to peer values, have impaired, to some degree, the integrity of the sense of agency that all children must develop. The opportunity to invest effort in the service of completing a drawing or musical performance that pleases the child might help children develop the personal agency that seems to me to be eroding.A third advantage to an arts/music program, which might help all children, is based on the fact that
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