Study Links High School Graduation Rates to Strong Arts Programs
November 26, 2009Report Just Released
The Center for Arts Education’s latest report analyzes the relationship between graduation rates and indicators of arts education. The study focuses on 200 public high schools in the New York City area. Findings reveal that schools with more access to arts education have the highest graduation rates.
Access the report by clicking here. More findings on the correlation between arts education and graudation can be found at the Keep Arts in Schools site.
This text was taken from a post on the Getty Teacher Art Exchange List-serv.
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It’s small wonder that strong arts programs motivate kids to stick around. Art, after all, is not just painting or playing an instrument — those are skills and techniques. Art is our “ability to make things.”
Kids know, from birth, about “ingenuity.” They learn to roll over, and later to crawl, without any teaching involved. Just pure ingenuity. The practice of ingenuity is, literally, “engineering.” But we keep that fact a secret by consistently mispronouncing the word — so they’ll think maybe engineering calls for superman skills? It doesn’t.
From ingenuity, often follows “creation:” the act of visualizing something that is yet to be. This can take place in the dark of night, or it can appear on a draftsperson’s drawing, or even simply as a work of art directly formed from the visualization.
Crea and credo are related. I believe I can do it!
Even without the right vocabularies, kids get this: the hypocrisy of teaching them to “sit down quietly and learn what I tell you.” Totally artificial, but highly efficient for storing standardized knowledge bytes: “In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”
Kids know that mankind — indeed, all lifeforms — must do things in order to survive. New (ingenuity) ideas (creations) take shape (art) and become things (artifacts). A factory is where artifacts are made!
Of all hypocrisies, the word “technology” was lately coopted in popular jargon to mean “communication via the Internet or a cell phone” or to mean “some confusing new computer program.” Nothing could be farther from the truth.
The word derives directly from tek-nai-logos — the sound of two stones tekking together, the Greek word for “it is right” and the Greek word for those silly little pictures we use to express ourselves in writing — often called “text.”
If one chips stones and he produces a useful stone blade, then the tutor says “nai” and gives the artisan a high five! He has mastered the “tek-nai” or technique.
So that the tutor can pass on her skills long after she passes from life, she ‘ingenutes’ a way to form logos into stone or clay, and the written result — which today engineers call a process specification, and cooks call a recipe — is technology. In the dictionary, it says “mankind’s ability to meet its needs and wants” . . . but of course dictionarians are much too stuck-up to think about bird nests. “It’s all about me!”
The first logo was the character X. The symbol of two arms striking rocks together. X was later used in contorted ways (various fonts?) to become X, K, T, t, tau, ks and many other logos that we find in words like taxi, tacks, technical, text . . . It has come a long, long way! It even appears on bank contracts today.
But kids feel this! Innately, they’ll do anything they can to find a tool and a workpiece — a hammer or a violin; a nail or a tune.
We hold them back from practicing art, at our own peril. We are a creative people, by nature. Pass it on.