Have you ever thought why we send children to school? Why is education necessary? Firstly, schools provide children with cultural values that vary in every culture and that are necessary to become a good citizen. Also, schools upskill children and prepare them for a job related to their areas of interest. Finally, perhaps the most important function of schools is to teach children how to be better human beings. One of the important parts of education is art including music, drama, dance, and painting. Dana Arts and Cognition Consortium report (2008) maintains that there is “tight correlation” between arts training and improvements in cognition, attention, and learning (2008, pp.1-4). It also supports that an interest in a performing art enables to develop a high state of motivation that creates sustained attention needed to develop performance. Thus, it is essential that art classes be in the school system.
First of all, art education encourages academic achievement because they help children understand other subjects much more clearly. Students taking any art lessons have more tendency to learn other disciplines such as numerical lessons, language, and social sciences. One of the reasons is that music lessons improve cognitive performance. According to Sousa (2006), even passive listening to certain music affects the parts of the brain functioning in memory recall and visual imaginary (2006, pp.1-2). For example, listening to Mozart promotes a variety of spatial and temporal reasoning task (Sousa, 2006, p.2) By means of those influences; background music in the classroom facilitates students to maintain focusing while engaging in specific learning tasks. Second of the reasons is that music lessons improve numerical skills. Mathematics is most closely connected to music. Counting is important to music because one is supposed to count rests and beats. Moreover, a musician uses geometry to remember the appropriate finger positions for
References: Elkins, J. (2001). Theories, Why art cannot be taught (3th ed.). (pp. 7-8): University of Illinois Press. Gazzaniga, M. (2008). The dona consortium report on arts and cognition. in Asbury. C. & Rich, B. (Eds.), Learning, arts, and the brain (5th ed.). pp. 1-4). New York: Dana Press. Sousa, D. (2006, December). How the arts develop the young brain. Retrieved April 10, 2013, from http://www.education.com/print/arts-develop-young-brain-neurescience