SSR 16: Art Class

While in Madison, I was lucky enough to visit my friend Ms. Walsh’s Art Classroom.

The class I visited was putting their knowledge of Monet to good use in the school garden. I took some time to speak to each group of students, asking them about their painting and learning a bit about what they were doing. 

It should be of no surprise to you that I am an advocate for fine arts in education. I was lucky enough to be involved in several fine art classes and programs through out my schooling in both Illinois and Wisconsin, and I stand behind the belief, without a doubt, that the opportunities I was given through out my time in school in the arts has made me into the person I am today.  I would also be quick to say that the lessons I learned in my art classes were much more long lasting, and relevant to my life today, then some of the more “traditional” classes I had in high school.  I long for the day when the students in this country count their fine arts classes as “traditional” education.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature’s monotony.
The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed.
The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish.
Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity;
even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere. -Guillaume Apollinaire

Throughout history people have recorded their struggles, their dreams and their lives in works of art.
Young people cannot participate in the human conversation or have a true understanding of human history
without engaging in the study of the arts. –Christine Goodheart

 
Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time
and one toward the future, toward eternity. -Daniel Barenboim

 
Whether we think of the arts as languages, forms of intelligence or learning modalities,
most educators agree that the arts can engage diverse learners
and provide them with opportunities to share what they know. –Christine Goodheart

  
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. -Henry Ward Beecher

The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common
is more urgent than what differentiates them. –John Berger

Imagination makes empathy possible, because to understand another
we must be able to imagine living their life. –Christine Goodheart

 
The arts are windows on the world in the same way that science helps us see the world around us. –Charles Fowler

The arts are as basic to enlightened citizenship
as understanding the workings of numbers, words, and history. –Christine Goodheart