Arts in Public Education
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The arts should be a common factor in the curriculum of public schools. By the arts I mean visual arts, music, theatre, and dance. Children should be exposed to all of these at a young age, whether they show talent in one of them or not, and with this "no child left behind act" it seems there might be an opportunity to expand art education in public schools.
Most students kindergarten through twelfth grade in the United States do no have any of these arts in their schools required curriculum, most are elective or non-existent. Even though 81 percent of schools in the United States say students are instructed in music once a week, only one in four eighth graders say they sing or play an instrument once a week. (Thomas)
The main problem is there are very limited requirements in the arts for children attending public schools. Today everyone is too worried about state mandate testing and SAT's to even think about anything else. What I mean by this is, the teachers instructing these so-called art programs in schools are not challenging the student's creativity, or letting them explore their creativity themselves. Examples of letting students explore their own imagination and creativity would be something like one student writing a poem, and another student performing an interpretive dance to go along with that poem, or making a movie and writing their own script and music to go along with it. These activities would challenge student's creativeness, also it would let students explore
several types of arts instead of just having music or pottery class...