Fine Arts

Fine Arts constitute a fundamental component of basic education whose primary purpose in the schools is to develop intuition, reasoning, imagination, and dexterity into unique forms of expression and communication. Arts education benefits both student and society. It benefits students because it cultivates the whole child, gradually building many kinds of literacy. This process requires not merely an active mind but a trained one. Arts education also helps students by initiating them into a variety of ways of perceiving and thinking.

The arts cultivate the direct experience of the senses; they trust the unmediated flash of insight as a legitimate source of knowledge. Their goal is to connect student and experience directly, to build the bridge between verbal and nonverbal, between the strictly logical and the emotional - the better to gain an understanding of the whole. Both approaches are powerful and both are necessary; to deny students either is to disable them.