The essential criterion of the value of any educational offering is its effect upon a young person as he or she strives for completeness. It has been the experience of the members of the Art Department that young students very naturally commit themselves to learning in the fine arts with enthusiasm, high spirits and earnest intent. Art intimately pertains to the truth of the wholeness of human nature, especially when in its perfection it transcends the realm of ordinary experience and its partial verities.
Art is the creative testimony of free individuals.
In art education, not only is an individual exercised in personal, free, human expression, but one also develops skill in a fundamental form of human communication. As communication, art mediates the purely personal and the social dimension of life. It well accommodates the more highly refined, subtle and nuanced sentiments of human experience. As communication, art can take place only within and by virtue of a common mental and spiritual horizon embracing at a given time the meaning and order of the world, of human existence and of experience in common. In the classroom discipline of an arts education students develop habits of concentration and industry needed for achievement in all areas of human endeavor.