Where is art and culture in the national curriculum?
For many years there has been an ongoing debate regarding significance of art and culture in the national curriculum. While the funding and the teaching hours for art, design and craft subjects have been decreasing throughout the years, the importance of art has not. It has been rather concerning to see the British Government introducing modifications to the curriculum in 2012, with no arts subject in sight on the English Baccalaureate. The changes had certainly sparked the attention of the artistic community, with a critique from Elizabeth Price who decided to speak on the issue in her Turner Prize’s acceptance speech painting a rather depressing picture of arts education and explaining that in the future young students may never have the possibility to even imagine being an artist one day. You might want to ask yourself a question then… why is art and cultural education so fundamental to our society and economy, but most importantly to ourselves? In this essay I will focus on establishing the place of art and culture in the national curriculum and their challenges and potential in teaching, while drawing attention to the importance of such education.
In this paragraph, I will attempt to define the place of art and culture in the curriculum. In the last 10 years there have been numerous changes made to the way we teach and examine the knowledge of young people, consequently it led to schools and teachers being reviewed on how well they apply those changes, their management and the quality of work, which contributed significantly to the discussion about the purpose of education in general and the art subjects’ place in the curriculum and their role in our society. In the foreword to the document “Cultural Education. A summary of programmes and opportunities”, produced by the Department for Education and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the government representatives explain the importance of art and its ability to form a universal language, indicating that artistic education is central to child’s development and what differentiate us as humanity from other beings. The approach the government decided to take was to leave the decision about the art curriculum’s content to the teachers. However, that was only applied in some of the schools creating differences within the country and draining schools from resources, which Eileen Adams in her essays points out to be the reason behind the increasing possibility of school privatisation. For these reasons many schools had to cut down the teaching hours of art subjects and art departments were affected by redundancies, often leaving the teaching to the ones without relevant qualification, prioritizing and regarding other subjects as more ‘important’. As a matter of fact, most of the art and design’s programmes and PGCE courses have seen significant cuts, accordingly leaving many institutions searching for independent providers to carry out the curriculum, such as museum, galleries and professionals. On the other hand, the ‘creative’ industries keep on thriving and experiencing growth in employment, contrary to the very little or no growth in other industries.
In order to understand the point of this essay better I think it is essential to focus in this paragraph on the importance of art and culture and their influence on our society. Artistic education is often taken for granted and being reduced to the mere representation of it… comparable to kids drawing a house with a couple of trees next to it, making a mess with paints or just looking at ‘some’ painting. Therefore, many people see artistic education as a shallow form of entitlement, unfortunately failing to recognize the effects it has on our cognitive thinking, sense of creativity, imagination, emotional intelligence and freedom of thought and action. It is important to realise that young people of twentieth-first century live in the world where culture constantly goes through rapid changes and the cultural diversity keeps on increasing, hence the necessity to provide an education that would enable them to understand these processes and their values, by all means, it is undoubtedly possible through cultural development of knowledge. The report on Arts Education produced by UNESCO says that “Arts Education contributes to an education which integrates physical, intellectual, and creative faculties and makes possible more dynamic and fruitful relations among education, culture, and the arts.” To put it in another way, arts education helps to develop imagination, competence and creativity by enabling us to use variation of sensory experiences in order to communicate and understand different ideas and meanings, moreover it teaches us how to appreciate and value images and artefacts and notably the relevance of the contexts behind them. These are the capabilities and opportunities which may be especially useful to young people at the present time. Point often overlooked, many families face the struggles of living in the capitalistic society, where the morality and importance of a family keeps decreasing, parents do not spend time with their children, but rather hand them a tablet or sit them down in front of TV not being in control of what their offspring is exposed to, e.g. online, which often leaves the children deprived of parental attention that results in poor relationship between family members, not to mention the lack of communication or transferring of cultural capital between them. By the same token, knowledge and practice of artistic subjects allows students to develop a reflective and critical thinking not only towards others’ work but also their own. That is to say by expanding their artistic appreciation they not only learn how to think like artists, they also become more aware of the function of the cultural and creative industries or become artists themselves.
I think it would be beneficial for the argument to talk about the therapeutic effects of artistic practices and education. In the study on effects and effectiveness of arts education it is said that most of the pupils while reflecting on the art lessons they received at school made comments about their personal enjoyment while in class. The study concluded that “The therapeutic value of the arts was an effect mentioned by both pupil and teachers as having a calming effect on a pupil’s temperament or offering a release of tension and a means of escape from the real world.” Altogether, artistic education can be seen as a way to exercise dealing with criticism and one’s emotions, moreover it contributes to the release of everyday life’s stress. The analysis also revealed that many students choose arts subjects because they seem to require a different type of concentration, which is more ‘unwinding’ and brings them joy. Could this mean that the students who do not participate in arts lesson feel more distress and miserable at school?
In this paragraph I would like to discuss the potential in teaching art and culture. In order to make a difference in arts curriculum a good idea would be an introduction of a programme which would offer some extra art-based activities for young people. Possibly similar to what was introduced in Lithuania, where the project “Methods for Partnership” which aimed to occupy students during after-school hours improving their creativity and exposing to means of self-expression supported artistically skilled students and was spreading cultural awareness and knowledge of the local community. It is essential to work with children on creative articulation by introducing them to resources available in the library, visiting the theatre, museum or galleries as it provides a diverse and stimulating curriculum.
Given these points I am certain in claiming that art and culture must be taken seriously when constructing the national curriculum.
Nowadays, it seems that having Academic qualifications might not be enough to secure a steady career, therefore many employers seek for people with high socio-communicative and creative skills, ones who will adapt according to situation and use their imagination to think on their feet, as you may have gathered from the above analysis, these abilities can be obtain through arts education.