Arts feed curiosity, creativity, connection

By Gina Barreca

Monday, Aug. 25, 2014 | 2 a.m.

We need to keep teaching the arts in our schools.

If art weren’t important, all kids’ backpacks would be gray.

If understanding that colors have names and learning how lines and dots can turn into pictures isn’t crucial to the development of imagination in childhood, then why aren’t classroom walls blank?

If learning about music at a young age weren’t important, would so many of us still only be able to recite the letters of the alphabet by singing the little song in our head? (Could you really tell what letters come before or after “O” without the song?)

If theater, movement and performance weren’t important, why would we look forward to watching “Fantasia,” “Downton Abbey” or “Get On Up”? Why else mourn the deaths of Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall — many of us feeling these losses were personal — if not for the fact that great performers use their voices, faces and gestures to hold a mirror up to life so that we might see ourselves more clearly?

Charles Dickens talked about the need for “fancy” and not only “facts” brilliantly throughout “Hard Times,” his novel about education. Only by nurturing and invigorating the imagination, Dickens tells us, can schools permit a young mind “the wild escape into something visionary.”

Classes in the arts are where kids learn that they can improvise and by making something up, make something new and better. The word “disrupt” is not exclusively synonymous with misbehavior but is used the way scientists as well as artists use it: to believe that a confident, often playful idiosyncrasy lies beneath the best inventions and creations.

As a child you meet yourself instinctively in the arts: in the finger-paints, in the glue, in the chorus, in the dance. The arts are tactile, auditory and sensory where many other subjects are simply mandatory.

Through the arts, kids who are bewildered and frustrated in other classroom settings can become not only intrigued but remarkably articulate in the forms of expression permitted them through nonlinear and nonverbal communication.

It’s not surprising, then, that as a nation increasingly wary of justifying any educational opportunity that can’t be measured by a standardized test, we’re in danger of underfunding one of the most essential aspects of our children’s collective experience. To balance schoolwork that’s competitive, repetitive and derivative, we need to offer our students something apart from lunch and gym as the only alternatives.

Not every moment of education needs to be based solely on the simple accumulation of information and not all learning should be based on moving children in the same direction at the same pace by using the same materials toward the same goal, which is then measurable only by one instrument.

Art makes many of us nervous because we aren’t sure how to tell what’s good from what’s awful even outside of a classroom; we question the value of art because we fear our own ignorance. But acting out of ignorance isn’t exactly the best way to construct educational opportunity, is it?

The arts are an important part of the curriculum precisely because they are different from other classes: They encourage curiosity over mastery and creativity over proficiency.

And when it comes to special needs children or those struggling with anxiety, depression, attention deficits and autism, the arts are particularly valuable. According to Bonnie Januszewski, a socialization specialist who practices on Long Island, “Creating the opportunity for my kids to make art is like giving them permission to speak another language.” Explains Bonnie, who’s had real success in her 35 years of intensive engagement with children and teens, “Art turns your soul inside out — in a good way. It helps you figure out how to be a part of the world.”

Discoveries aren’t made only through microscopes and telescopes and it’s not only equations and algorithms that will improve the way we live.

The intimacy of art — connections forged between people who would otherwise remain strangers — is why Hippocrates declared “Ars longa, vita brevis”: art is eternal even though individual human lives are brief. Art isn’t an outlet that simply discharges energy but one that channels it, permitting a child to plug into a universal and timeless current that illuminates the world.

Gina Barreca is an English professor at the University of Connecticut, a feminist scholar who has written eight books, and a columnist for the Hartford Courant.