Should public education really have as one of its main byproducts the narrowing of students’ understanding of what makes for a truly educated person?

It is the case today that, simply put, too many people think the arts and humanities are just a frill, particularly in terms of education.  The case is seldom made convincingly that art, for instance, as a subject ought to be ranked alongside math and science as elemental to a public school curriculum.  The current focus on standardized testing–which is also devastating to history knowledge–risks making our concept of education more and more limited.

A wonderful little book entitled Why Our Schools Need the Arts, by Jessica Hoffman Davis, tackles this mindset head-on.  “We need to include the arts in education not because they serve other kinds of learning,” she writes, “but because they offer students opportunities for learning that other subjects do not.”

Math and science and history are important, crucial even, for education, and it’s a mistake to pit the arts against them.  Those who advocate for the importance of art in the curriculum ought not to denigrate other fields of study (including athletics and organized sports) nor should they rely on the argument that art helps kids with math, or science or whatever.  Art is a distinct form of knowledge in the same way that math is a form of knowledge.  Sure, one needs to know how to divide and things like that, but one also needs to know how to interact with works of sublime creativity that distill complex emotions.

The capacity for imagination and the ability to have fitting and proper emotional reactions can be either developed or stunted.  In her book, Davis points out that study of the arts fosters imagination, expression, empathy, reflection, and allows kids to experience the effects of interpretation and, just as important, ambiguity.  These are all elements of life with which people need a great deal of fluency to survive in our contemporary world.  “Because they address the ambiguity of works of art,” she says, “the arts in education introduce children to the idea of multiple interpretations,” of a single object.  This is a complicated notion not easily mastered, and rarely encountered in math or science.

Children need to be made conversant with those fields that aren’t able to be slotted into multiple choice questions.  Life is really a whole lot more like art than it is like a standardized test.