By unveiling a powerful thinking culture in the art room, our study
suggests ways that we can … start using the arts to restore balance and
depth to an education system increasingly skewed toward readily testable
skills and information. While arts teachers rightly resist making their
classes like ‘academic’ classes, teachers of academic subjects might well
benefit from making their classes more like arts classes. For students
living in a rapidly changing world, the arts teach vital modes of seeing,
imagining, inventing and thinking. If our primary demand of students
is that they recall established facts, the children we educate today will
find themselves ill-equipped to deal with problems like global warming,
terrorism and pandemics. Those who have learned the lessons of the
arts, however − how to see new patterns, how to learn from mistakes
and how to envision solutions − are the ones likely to come up with the
novel answers needed most for the future