A healthy and happy child is a product of consistent and careful building of their self-esteem by parents, teachers, family and friends.

A high self-esteem allows the child to grow and enjoy the essential “can-do” attitude that we instantly recognize and associate with role models and successful adults.

Coupled with a child’s self-esteem is confidence. When children believe in themselves, they feel less concerned with taking risks.

Of course this confidence is kept in check with a dose of reality by experienced parents. Over-confidence leads to unnecessary disappointment, and inappropriate risk taking may be dangerous.  

The third leg of the chair has got to be independence. The independent child has high self-esteem, confidence and creativity.

Programs After School allows parents to “drop-off” their children for 45 minutes or an hour.

We strongly encourage an autonomous art experience for children and our art studio affords them the freedom to take risks with their creativity in a fun and non-judgmental environment.

In our experience, children are visibly happy when they create their own art in an independent way, free from the expectations of parents.

This expression of creativity allows the child to immerse themselves in the art experience.  When observing this process, the child is very calm, highly focused and really busy.

Many of our students have learning disabilities and their parents have wisely realized the therapeutic effects of an autonomous art experience.

There is no doubt that the creative visual art experience is beneficial to brain development, hand eye coordination, fine motor skill development, logical reasoning and critical thinking.

Art instruction companies who instruct children to imitate the visual arts project and conform to a template are only feeding the child for a day.

We believe that teaching a child to take risks and create, equips them for a lifetime of creativity and innovation.

We take care is protecting the independent “zone” around the child. We prefer to guide, instruct and then back-off to allow them to create.

Assisting young art students in their drawing or painting is by exception however we constantly encourage them and praise them for taking risks with color, mixing paint, changing textures and anything resembling risk taking.

Please be generous with your words to develop pride in progress and accomplishments.

Innovate not imitate.

Author: Richard L. Borland. July 27, 2009

Director of Operations at Programs After School, Inc.

Why are art programs the first to be cut?

In times of financial difficulty, the public schools from Kindergarten to High School prioritize their targets for expense reduction and art programs (and art teachers) are the first to be cut.

The public schools appear to be performing some cost and benefit analysis whereby the practice and education in music, drawing and painting from an early age is underestimated and undervalued.

Art education as a real-world tool

Art is an inherently personal and creative process. Art education is an experiential process which stimulates creative thinking. It would be an entirely academic endeavor to perform a purely theoretical study of music, drawing and painting without the practical application of the learning. Education in music, drawing and painting is both theoretical and practical and has immediate real-world impact.

Creative and critical thinking, innovation and continuous process improvement

The creative thinking process is not without challenge. In fact, challenge inspires the creative process and leads to invention and problem-solving. With a fundamental education in art comes the practice of creativity where the student learns and experiences the creative process, develops analytical skills and builds a solid foundation for critical thinking.

Creativity and critical thinking are prerequisites for innovation. It is far more difficult to synthesize than to analyze.

The creative art experience is evolutionary and non-repetitive. The creative artist will never produce exactly the same result regardless of the number of iterations. The creative learning process allows the student to analyze their creativity and improve on it in each iteration. This is continuous process improvement within the avenue for expression.

Analyzing X-rays of the Master’s paintings by the genius of Da Vinci or Michelangelo reveals many pencil drawings underneath, each different and each an improvement on the next.

The multi-dimensional and multi-disciplinary essence of art

The learning of fundamentals in the creative process is multi-disciplinary. Creativity is common to mathematics, science, technology and art however; creative art education provides an efficient, fundamental and incremental learning experience in the child who is too young to grasp the sophistication of creative mathematical constructs.

The creative artist is a multi-dimensional thinker who is often misclassified as a “craftsman”.  In the process of creating a painting, sculpture or composing music, the artist is a mathematician, an architect, a chemist, an engineer, a designer and a craftsman. In the case of the art masters, the artist is the technological innovator.

The creative art experience involves all the senses and is inherently holistic. When reducing classes in public schools, computer classes are retained over art classes. The elimination of art programs favors essential learning in mathematics and technology but limits creative learning to the visual and auditory senses. For example, computer-based learning in graphic design limits the young student’s opportunity to experience the smell and feel of the medium as well as the experience of learning about multiple media including the variations in paint, texture, oil and canvas and the blending of colors and light. In combination, all these experiential dimensions produce highly complex and multi-disciplinary challenges that stimulate problem-solving skills.

Art, Culture and Invention

Education in art also embodies a cultural learning dimension which is often used to justify the maintenance and importance of the art programs in public schools and in society. One of the slogans of Americans for the Arts is “The Arts Captures the American Experience”. The cultural component is also well-used in Japan where the Ministry of Labor sets the Junior School curriculum to include cultural arts, expression, moral education and industrial arts for all students. The cultural learning component of art education is highly significant to society however it pales in comparison to the positive impact of the development of critical-thinking skills.

There is an opportunity for further academic study to determine correlation to the number of new inventions produced by a country where creative art education is present in elementary and middle schools versus countries where creative art education is absent.

Invention does not merely apply to a patent for a design actually the patent process may limit innovation. Invention also applies to the creation (or manufacture) of the end product.

Innovation

Innovation is a visionary process. The vision is a more clearly-defined end result involving inspiration, creativity and often the firm understanding of a hybrid of several concepts. This is exactly the experiential process of drawing, painting and composing. Art always emphasizes originality yet it relies on what is possible and often creates what is not yet possible. This is the essence of expressing the imagination into tangible innovation.

Providing a child with avenues for expression in art is nurturing and developing a brain that is experienced at multi-dimensional problem-solving, critical-thinking, continuous process improvement and innovation.  Ultimately, to be the leaders in innovation, our culture needs to have a very high prioritization for creative-thinking.

It defies logic that we cut art programs first.

We emphasize the need to understand the tactical as well as the operational, the navigational map and the car yet we are turning out operators of the technology who lack the conceptual understanding of the creative process itself.

REFERENCES:

Kessler, Richard. Dewey21C Arts Education. June 11, 2009

Arts Education Cuts at New York City Public Schools: A Tale of Two Worlds

http://www.artsjournal.com/dewey21c/2009/06/arts-education-cuts-at-new-yor.html

Wynn, Nancy. Forum on Public Policy: A Journal of the Oxford Round Table (Summer 2007)(10602 words) From Academic OneFile). 

Image making and meaning: educational benefits to studying design in the 21st century.

Smollin, Melanie. June 15, 2009.

TakePart: Public Education’s Dying Arts.

http://www.takepart.com/blog/2009/06/15/public-education%e2%80%99s-dying-arts/

Bhattacharjee, Riva. March 13, 2009. Berkeley Daily Planet.

School Board Approves Cuts to Programs to Address Budget Deficit

http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2009-03-12/article/32469?headline=School-Board-Approves-Cuts-to-Programs-to-Address-Budget-Deficit-

Valentine, Pamelia D. February 2008. Educational Leadership. Vol 65,  Number 5
Teaching Students to Think. Thinking Like an Artist

http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/feb08/vol65/num05/Thinking_Like_an_Artist.aspx

Winner, E. & Hetland, L. September 2, 2007. The Boston Globe.

Art for our sake. School arts classes matter more than ever - but not for the reasons you think.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/09/02/art_for_our_sake/

When you think back to when you were a kid, and that could be a lot of thinking, the learning that really stuck was usually presented by excellent teachers.

There were visual effects - like the time the science teacher dropped a little too much sodium in the water and blew a hole in the ceiling of the science lab.

There were really funny moments - like when the teacher explained about the earth and the globe broke off the stand and rolled out the classroom.

Then there were those special "lights on" moments when the science teacher was also the geography teacher and everything joined together suddenly made sense. The connection was made and the world changed.

Art is intrinscially creative and it provides the linkage to critical thinking that allows children to apply their knowledge in the real world.

This is a great article from the Boston Globe about how the schools focus on math and science and seem to miss the essential creative education provided by the arts - actually in hard times, the art programs are the first to be cut: : http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/09/02/art_for_our_sake/

Programs After School is focussed on drawing and painting but within that learning process is a real excitement for academics.

Our new classes highlight our latest journey in the eternal quest to keep kids stimulated, engaged and highly creative.
http://www.programsafterschool.com/Services.html