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Home › Articles › Back to School Headquarters › Advocating for the Arts

Advocating for the Arts

Building Morale, Attendance and Educational Skills With the Arts

Part One

By Kim Byrum Skinner

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Tom Hatfield believes it's time for a radically different approach to art advocacy. The discipline, he reports, is strong enough to stand on its own, and in fact, always has been. Cut it from public school budgets and you're sending young adults into the world unprepared for 21st-century communication.

A Necessary Art
"What you're cutting out is children's accessibility to learn things that they wouldn't get anywhere else in the curriculum," says Hatfield, executive director of the National Art Education Association (NAEA), based in Reston, Va. "Let me give you an example. You buy stock in IBM or Toshiba or General Motors. You get an annual report with four-color art. It's got photos in there dynamic photos. There are pie charts and graphs. And you look and say, 'Why did they do that?' Well, one of the reasons and this is not necessarily 'art,' but 'visual literacy' is because it's much more effective and much more efficient to use four-color art and graphics and visual imagery to convey information than it is to have nothing but text, like a phone book."

Founded in 1947, NAEA is the world's largest professional art education association and a leader in art education policy, practice and research. Its 40,000 members include elementary and secondary teachers, university professors, artists, administrators, arts council staff, museum and program educators, publishers, manufacturers and suppliers of art materials and concerned parents and students.

"There are a couple of things that people can do to advocate successfully for the arts," Hatfield says. "Number one, talk to the principal. 'How can we get more art in this school?' Number two, communicate to the school board that this is what you want. I've been in the business a little over 40 years, and I can tell you, the parent is the most effective way to get something done in schools. If the principal or superintendent sees parents saying, 'We need this; we want this,' it'll get done a lot quicker than anything else."

While study of the arts may enhance other skills, assist in the transfer of learning in other academic areas, improve attendance and morale and strengthen social insight and personal development, NAEA promotes teaching art for art's sake.

Effective art advocacy, NAEA leaders contend, must market and present art education as a thoroughly unique discipline with equally unique skill sets critical to developing multicultural understanding.

"We're dealing more and more with imagery in the world through advertising, for example," Hatfield says. "It's not necessarily fine arts in the sense of looking at Rembrandts, but we study the same principles. If we deny that to kids, we're denying learning about that and how we cope with the world."

Essential to Education
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