The Arts in Schools - Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

to and an understanding of certain values: tolerance, freedom,equality and a respect for other people including a regard forthe excellent and a disdain for the shoddy and the secondrate.For, even if it is true that economics demand that ourpupils be schooled, it is also true that parents and societywant them educated. For all of these reasons, the schoolcurriculum must provide for development and work in thebalancing activities of art, music, literature, dance, drama andmovement.27 Other Arts activities have other beneficial effects. First, they canoutcomes help to develop qualities and abilities that have very practicalof the arts applications: grace, poise and balance in gesture and movement;sharpness of vision, hearing and touch; a high degreeof co-ordination between hand and eye; an ability to expressoneself in precise terms. Second, the visual arts, drama,dance, and music, for example, can have valuable therapeuticfunctions in the treatment of some physical and/or emotionaldisorders (see Chapter 6). Certainly, the arts have been usedto beneficial effect in schemes of therapy in hospitals andclinics. Third, there are the opportunities they provide forre-creation of the individual, in giving him or her differentperspectives and challenges away from the pre-occupationsof the everyday business, industrial or domestic worlds.28 The arts We must emphasise here that we do not see the importanceandof the arts only in terms of a much-discussed need nowadaysrecreation to provide 'education for leisure'. There are two reasons forthis. First, the arts are of central importance to humanbeings whatever the social and economic circumstances. Theyare not to be seen simply as pastimes, whose importanceincreases as the opportunities for 'real' work decline. Forthe reasons we have given, although they are, in an importantsense, recreative, to associate them only with leisure isto set them apart from the 'serious' aspects of life withwhich they are intimately involved.Second, whether several million long-term unemployedmen and women will consider themselves to be leisuredremains to be seen. Economically and psychologically theneed in our culture to work is so deeply rooted that thelong-term consequences of unemployment on the scale nowin prospect are hard to envisage. It is easier to see that theequation of less work with more leisure is simplistic. Thearts are not a palliative for unemployment. By introducingpupils to these possibilities in our schools, however, wemay help them to prepare more fully for future problems,opportunities and needs while opening a wide spectrum ofinterests in the present.26