Why the Arts matter for our young people.
Art is important.
Now, as an art teacher, I am biased; I am unapologetic about that. I teach Art because I love it, and I value it because I see its benefits every day. But when I say Art, I don’t just mean the kind of Art I do. Music, dance, drama are all equally important.
The recent announcement of cuts to arts courses is devastating. It is hard enough for young people to feel like pursuing a creative subject is secure without our government basically shouting from the rooftops that they don’t value them.
But while this announcement is awful, it’s not surprising.
Education as a whole is underfunded and undervalued. (That is an issue all by itself!) Why that fact is relevant here is that the Arts as a whole suffer as a result. Even though creative industries now contribute over £100 billion to the UK economy and employ over 2 million people, they are still seen by many as a soft option. And there isn’t the funding needed to change that.
In the 10+ years I have been teaching, I have seen the time allocated to the arts decrease dramatically. This is understandable. Although every year we see on the news that more students than ever have passed exams, and therefore obviously exams have got easier (?!), they are harder. Ask any teacher of any subject. There is barely enough time to teach all the material they need to know, to cover all of the topics they need to, and for them to master the skills they need to succeed. That is all before they sit exams where the grade boundaries are almost always higher than the year before. So for them to get better results each year just shows you how hard they are working, and the balancing act schools have to play to allocate time to each subject to facilitate their learning.
This pressure from all directions has lead to the arts as a whole taking up less of the timetable than they used to. This system lets down children and young people. I am lucky. I work in a school where The Arts are valued. Our students have an excellent range of Arts lessons. But in many places, students don’t get to experience as much of the joy of learning by making, doing and creating as students from previous years did.
There is not as much time to explore, to find a hidden talent, and let it grow. And that’s a real shame because the arts develop transferable skills for life. Through The Arts, children develop their imagination, creativity, problem solving, teamwork, resilience, perseverance. I could go on!
Teaching Art, I find that some young people from all backgrounds use it as a form of relief. I have had so many students tell me Art is the lesson they look forward to, whether it’s because they feel like it’s less stressful, it’s their favourite hobby, or it’s their “chill subject”, it can often be a high point in the school day. A lot of students feel this way about other creative subjects too.
This is not a coincidence. The arts engage different skills, and for some students, creative subjects are the only ones where they don’t feel like a failure.
Developing a creative skill and seeing their progress can help to boost young people’s confidence and self-esteem. With a generation whose mental health is suffering extensively from over testing, exam pressure and social media, the importance of improving their perceptions of themselves cannot be overlooked.
The Arts can give students who are not so academically able a chance to shine. We are not all the same. There is beauty in that, and our differences should be celebrated. By not encouraging The Arts, we are failing our young people. We are implying that what they are good at or what they enjoy has less value, and by extension, they have less value.
I cannot tell you how many times students have spoken to me, and my colleagues disheartened and unnerved because they want to choose a mixture of creative subjects at GCSE and have been discouraged by family and friends. Generally with the same statement, “you’ll never get a job doing that”. And they worry. They worry a lot. The things they love suddenly seem like a wrong choice, and their entire futures seem to hinge on it. They don’t want to do something else, but they fear they will fail at life (yes, that’s something students worry about at age 13) if they choose creative subjects.
Hopefully, they share these fears and can be told of all the fantastic skills they will get from the creative subjects, and that they can use these skills in other subjects and life as they grow up. They will be told about the many fulfilling creative careers that they have only heard a fraction of and the joy it can bring them both personally and professionally as they grow up.
Hopefully, they get told about that, but many won’t.
And now, even those students who are told all of those things will potentially struggle to find further education courses because of the cuts. This may be enough to prevent many young people from continuing with the arts as a career. We will all be worse off in the long run if that’s the case.
We need our young people to believe that it’s okay to follow their passion for The Arts. That it’s okay to follow their dreams, to trust their instincts, and it’s okay to take risks. Because whether they grow up to work in a creative industry or not, we need them to grow up to be creative adults. In all areas, we need people who don’t just “think outside the box”; they break the box, throw away the pieces and design a better storage solution.
