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Jim Sneddon The National Art Education Association (NAEA) states that art is one of the most revealing of human activities, as well as one of the richest sources for understanding cultures, because the earliest things we know of ourselves are recorded in visual forms and images. A comprehensive arts education promotes the attainment of knowledge, understandings, and skills that contribute to the student’s intellectual, social, emotional, and physical development.
A comprehensive arts education program also is the perfect place to begin increasing children’s awareness of a variety of cultures, and plays a key role in affecting children’s long-term beliefs (Boutte, 2000). Saul and Saul (2001) caution teachers to move away from the “tourist approach” (p. 38) to teaching multicultural education wherein we “visit” different cultures, never to discuss them again. Multicultural experiences for young children should become a part of the child’s artistic awareness throughout the whole year.
Ernest Boyer, of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and a noted expert on the arts, emphasizes the importance of arts education and has identified three reasons we need arts education in our schools. It is difficult not to pay attention to his view of art as “one of mankind’s most visual and essential forms of language, and if we do not educate our children in the symbol system called the arts, we will lose not only our culture and civility, but our humanity as well” (Boyer, 1987, p. 16). The figure below presents a summary of the reasons Boyer feels that the arts can make such a difference in a child’s school experiences.
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© ______ 2006, Merrill, an imprint of Pearson Education Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The reproduction, duplication, or distribution of this material by any means including but not limited to email and blogs is strictly prohibited without the explicit permission of the publisher.
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