Interestingly enough, these are precisely the skills the business community now so avidly seeks in its new employees. Not finding them, it is calling for a radical restructuring of the American educational system. Students employ the style of learning that suits them best, and the arts become a support to the curriculum. Outstanding artistic work can occur, giving an important aesthetic content to the broad themes being studied. Teachers become excited about their new roles as facilitators, and a culture of high standards and high academic achievement within a school is the result.
School becomes an exciting place to be.
In fact, the most important benefit of the arts may be the education of the imagination . We at The Center for Arts in the Basic Curriculum call for a restructuring of American education through the arts, and our purpose is to assist in bringing this about. They should join forces with the current reform impulse that aspires to transform the whole structure of learning, the whole climate of learning, the whole relationship between the teacher and the student. They should promote the arts as the vanguard to meaningful restructuring of the schools. The compelling message the arts bring to education is a difficult one to articulate, and school change may be difficult to achieve.