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Educational Experience For Learners Of All Ages

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The arts are essential to providing a healthy educational experience for learners of all ages. Though treated by many as frivolous subjects, they provide vital tools for communication, engagement and successful instruction. It makes sense to incorporate the arts across the curriculum – not only will schools improve, but students will develop important social and emotional skills, we will save money in the long run by keeping our students learning and engaged in work, and we will make the world a more beautiful place. To quote Charles Fowler (1994),
The arts are not pretty bulletin boards. They are not turkeys and bunny rabbits. They are not frivolous entertainment. The arts are our humanity. They are the languages of civilization through which we express our fears, our anxieties, our hungers, our struggles, our hopes. They are systems of meaning that have real utility. This is why schools that provide students with the means and the encouragement to explore these realms provide a better education. (p.9).
It is time for us to acknowledge as a society that schools are not just a building in which we instruct students on math, science and reading (though the arts would still be a vital tool even if that were the case). They are where students develop the skills essential to being human. Simply put, the arts can only benefit our schools, and should we choose to make them a priority, we will see definitive success. Using the arts in an academic setting allows teachers to

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