This Friday, Brookfield Central High School hosted the 12th annual Fine Arts Extravaganza. It was a day to recognize student's achievements in visual art, music, speech, writing and more. Throughout the day, teachers could sign their classes up for various activities around the school like photo shoots in the imaging rooms and abstract painting in the art hallway. There were tours of the campus, which had been filled with artwork students had created throughout the entire year. The event concluded with an all-school assembly at the end of the day, announcing Scholastic artist state finalists and winners in visual art and writing, as well as musical performances by the band, orchestra, and choir.
There's no doubt that this was a spectacular event, and a great way to celebrate the arts, but events like this seem to be so rare in high schools. For every celebrated artist, there're dozens of celebrated scholars. The focus is rarely on creativity of any kind. The bottom line is, the way school's deal with arts and scholastics is killing creativity.
Educators place more value on mathematics and science than the arts, and thus cause a decrease in creativity of students. When a student is not an amazing artist, people console them. They say it's okay, not everyone is talented that way. They don't have to take any art classes if they do not want. However when a student is not good at math, adults and students alike make them feel stupid. It isn't acceptable to be bad at math, so the student just has to work harder. They have to take more math classes, even if they hate the subject and never want to apply it to a career later in life. Why is there this double standard? Why is it okay for students to be bad at art, but not math? Furthermore, society sees art as a hobby rather than a career. Any kind of art classes in schools aren't taken seriously because very little people believe it can make a true career. This demeaning attitude towards the arts makes students less inclined to be involved in the arts in their schools and is causing so much creative potential to be lost.
It seems that all teenagers base their intelligence on one simple factor: grades. No one cares about wisdom beyond trivial information, like memorizing vocabulary words or knowing the anatomy of a plant cell. Teachers have a set of common goals and standards for each class that the students must meet in order to pass. The desire of teachers to have students meet these standards means a lot of rapid memorization, then regurgitation of information that students don't really understand. As soon as the class is over and a good grade is secure, the information is gone once again. Students feel that a good grade is more important than actually understanding the material. A good GPA is a sign of true intelligence to high schoolers, even though sometimes it is anything but.
The belief that grades are the most important thing in high school also causes students to prevent them from expressing their creativity. In an art class, who should be given the right to grade projects? How does one grade an art project? The need to grade assignments, even in art classes, means students spend more time worrying about fulfilling all of the sections on a rubric than creating what they'd truly like. There's room to be creative, but there isn't room to be as creative as one may like. Nowhere in school is there complete free reign of ideas, everywhere there are some kind of restrictions on creativity.
As kids grow older, there are even less opportunities to express oneself. In early elementary school, it seems that coloring is all the kids do. As they move to higher grades, however, they see less and less markers and crayons written on the school supply list. Is art seen as such a childish activity? Are professional artists any less competent than a doctor or lawyer? If a man spends nine years of his life studying sculpture, he should be given as much recognition as a man who spent nine years in school training to be a doctor. Both have spent an equal amount of time on their field in attempts to make a living out of what they are passionate about. Unfortunately, society condemns artists as immature, or less important than someone who works in a science or medical field.
Brookfield Central is a lucky school because they have a lot more opportunities to express themselves than other schools. In many places, the simple fact is that they don't allow funding for many art programs. Access to any kind of creativity at all, restricted or not, is very limited. Many schools don't have adequate supplies for art classes. This needs to come to an end. It's time to place the arts at the same worth as all other aspects of school. Once educators learn to stop basing their student's worth on their grades, they may finally be able to put an end to the destruction of creativity.
