Importance of the Arts in Education

Smoot's Remarks at the Arts Awards Ceremony |The Walker School's Middle School, Marietta, GA | Wednesday, 3 May 2006.  The student was Andy Linn, '06.  REVISED for presentation 11 January 2012.

Welcome parents, students, and faculty. We have scheduled this time in this big elegant box of a room to honor students who have made outstanding achievements in something that we call the "arts." After this, we move on to separate boxes, where we learn about things called math or literature, science or grammar. Later, many go to another box to change clothes and do sports for a couple of hours. Still later, we'll each go to a box where our family meets to eat and rest. In our unscheduled times we often plop down in front of a box with a flat screen to relax, and many of us get all we know about the world today out of that same box -- if we don't get bored a flip the channel. Once a week, we may go to a box where we are scheduled to think about God for a couple of hours.
I'm afraid that's how students experience their lives. It's not their fault: things have to be scheduled, subjects have to be taught, and we do best when we concentrate on one thing at a time.

But surely something's missing here.

All these thoughts came to mind one spring day when I ran into Andrew, one of our Walker seniors, whose high grades and portfolio from his AP art class earned him admittance to an arts program at Cornell University.

I asked him what I might say in a speech to help middle schoolers to see the importance of the arts in their schedule. He thought only a moment before he said, "Connections." He said, "Art class was always the highlight of my day." He explained that the other classes were hard, not very interesting to him, either. But then he had to prepare a dozen works of art in different media and styles for AP credit. When he was thinking about his art all day long, he suddenly found that he concentrated more and enjoyed his classes, because suddenly he saw connections between one subject and another. He said that they all went into his designs.

Now, he didn't have time to explain that part. Did he mean that he drew pictures of Presidents after he studied history? Was he putting equations onto canvasses? I really can't say.

But he reminded me of my senior year, when everything seemed to be coming together. That's when a soldier's poem brought the First World War home to me in a way that the history book did not. In Calculus class,  compressing vast amounts of data into a single equation, I realized that writing an equation is like writing a good poem, simplifying complex thoughts and feelings into a simple statement:  "all of this," the poet says, pointing to some metaphor, equals "that."

Andy's word "connections" made me consider how all thinking in all subjects is always a matter of finding a connection between two things that don't appear at first to be related. And the arts are the one part of our lives where we  connect our vision to an audience of people who do not know us. Arts require awareness of the world outside our little boxes, and skill to use vocabularies of musical notation and design, as well as the vocabulary of words.   The successful artist doesn't just express a feeling, but gets other people to feel it, too.

So, the arts don't fit in a single box. To think like an artist is to see the connections among all of our lives' little boxes.