Since the early 1980s, education in the United States has undergone a sea of change. Reformers have come to espouse a systemic perspective, viewing the different components of the education system as fundamentally interrelated. The challenge for educators is to create schools that help students acquire the knowledge, skills, confidence, and motivation to succeed in the increasingly sophisticated workforce and as parents and citizens.

Because the arts possess the power to play a role in meeting this challenge, an arts education must be fundamental, not incidental. I consider the arts to be the “fourth R” – a basic component in the curriculum and a basic tool in the school reform arsenal. But there are legions of people who do not see the arts as either intrinsically valuable or even useful in acquiring “real world” skills or achieving success in the “other basics.” Therefore, making the case for the arts to important constituencies involved in school reform – parents, business and civic leaders, other educators – is crucial.

In my experience, the case for the arts is built upon either (1) the intrinsic value of the arts or (2) the value of an arts education’s consequences. Both are valid.

To establish the value of an arts education’s consequences, its “real would” benefits, many people point to the wonderful skills and habits that artistic appreciation and production help form. Indeed, the arts stimulate, develop, and refine many cognitive and creative skills; they contribute significantly to the creation of the flexible and adaptable “knowledge workers” so many business people say will be crucial to the 21st century economy; and they draw upon and draw out the multiple intelligences of students.

On the other hand, trying to answer the question, “Why should we care about the arts?” from the standpoint of intrinsic value is a little like trying to answer the question, “Why should we care about our health?” The arts, like our health, need no calculus of justification. We engage in the arts, we ought to teach the arts, because this is part of what it means to be human. The arts are fundamental to communicating and understanding not only ourselves, but others. Through the arts we learn to appreciate, and even to create, things of beauty. We know about the ancient Greeks and Native Americans, for example, by the architecture, poetry, and paintings they left behind. We, too, will be known someday to future generations by the art we produce and leave to posterity. I believe that students cannot understand culture, their own or others’, without a solid sense of the arts.

There are other important points that strengthen the case for the arts to parents, to business people, to other educators.

Parents are naturally concerned with the basics. They can be taught how the arts are themselves basic and how they contribute to learning the “other” basics. Parents can be told how the arts help develop a young person’s character and values, confidence and empathy, respect and tolerance.

If, for example, you are a member of the cast of a play, you have an obligation to learn your lines well. You have to help pull the performance together. You can’t just ad lib and “do your own thing.” You have to work toward the goal of the group. Through the arts, children learn that there is a time for originality and a time for replication, a time to be the star and a time to be a productive member of the group. The arts help children build a value system in which they learn self-discipline and responsibility; they learn to value effort and to get enjoyment and inspiration from its results.

Business leaders want higher-order thinking skills in the 21st century – specifically, critical thinking and nimbleness in judgment, creativity and imagination, cooperative decision making, leadership, high-level literacy and communication, and the capacity for problem posing and problem solving. This is exactly what the arts help produce.

The so-called “creative arts industry,” moreover, is no small thing. The arts represent six percent of our gross national product, a figure equal to wholesale trade. In 1990, consumer spending on the performing arts outpaced expenditure on either motion pictures or sports. Meanwhile, technology is tapping into the arts and incorporating them into ever more sophisticated and stimulating products and processes. Even now future integration of arts and technology is being shaped in and by our school systems.

How, finally, do we make the case to other educators?

We must show, plainly and simply, that an arts education improves teaching and learning.

Educators say they want materials and activities that are “constructivist,” that is, concrete and hands-on. They seek materials that are multi-modal, multicultural, appealing and challenging to the classroom’s diverse range of learners. They look for activities that provide not just one means of assessment but multiple ways to track and evaluate a student’s progress. They want materials that promote critical thinking. They look for activities that are interdisciplinary.

So what do we know from decades of research? We now that the materials, the activities, the answers that address all these needs are to be found in the arts. We know:

• That an arts education contributes significantly to improved critical thinking, problem posing, problem solving, and decision making;
• That, as with language and mathematics, the crux of an arts education involves the communication, manipulation, interpretation, and understanding of complex symbols;
• That developing fluency in artistic expression and understanding fosters higher-order thinking skills of analysis, synthesis, and evaluations;
• That the arts are multi-modal, addressing and fostering the multiple intelligences of students (spatial abilities, for example, develop through drawing and sculpture, mathematical-logical abilities through producing and listening to music, kinesthetic or physical abilities through dance, interpersonal skills through drama);
• That the arts develop a person’s imagination and judgment, permitting each individual, in Maxine Greene’s classic phrase, to create “as if “ worlds, places where we see the world afresh.

Research confirms what we always knew intuitively: The arts teach all of us – students and teachers alike – innovation, novelty, and creativity. We learn to be wondrous.

We know, of course, that arts education is not the magic pill that will simultaneously reform schools and boost student’s achievement. Systemic reform in the 1990s has taught us that improving education will mean paying attention to all parts of the educational system. But the arts are a basic part of any program of education and crucial to any program of reform. Again, arts education must be fundamental, not incidental.