I can imagine what you are thinking after reading the title of this article...
- "Oh great, another guilt trip article from a homeschool leader on what I’m leaving out of my children’s education and how it will negatively impact my family for the next five generations. I can hardly wait to read this one! Who really cares about the arts anyway? We have science, math, history, English, foreign language, Bible study, sports, chores, character studies, community service, missions trips, church functions, political campaigns, and growing our garden to worry about, who has time for the arts? They just aren’t that important, and if we leave them out no one is going to notice. All of that stuff is just a distraction to real learning anyway and we’ve got to be serious here. After all, I’m trying to get my child into a good college and I just can’t spare the time from serious academic pursuits for something as non-essential as the arts."
As far as I can see, our educational system in this country has everything backwards, but then you knew that and that’s why you homeschool right? So why do we take a system that is broken and bring it into our homes as if it weren’t? Our current educational system has the academics as the core of learning and creativity emanates from the academics. Preeminence is given to the “important” subjects like math, science and history, then, if there is time and money left over, they add arts education. But, according to God’s word, the first thing we learn is that “In the beginning, God created…..” If we are to teach according to Scriptural principle, then creativity is to take the first place….to be the core of learning, and everything else will follow after that. It is God’s way and recent research proves this point.
- In 1993, SAT takers who had four year’s study in the arts scored 53 points higher on the verbal portion of the test and 37 points higher on the math portion than did the students who had no arts coursework.
- In a study comparing children ages 2-10, half of the group were given computer classes and the other half were given music lessons. Those who had the music lessons increased their intelligence 35% over those who had no music training.
- A Rockefeller Foundation study reveals that college music majors have the highest rate of admittance to medical school, 66.7 percent of those applying. The acceptance rate for biochemistry majors is only 59.2%.
So why should we as homeschoolers add the arts to our children’s education? Read on...
