Art Needed To Fill Education Gaps


by Rivky Shimon - Date: 2006-12-28 - Word Count: 459 Share This!

Schools are failing miserably even though they won't admit it. Standardized school tests are designed to grade the achievement of the schools. But while many students are producing work far below their grade level, schools are getting grades that seriously deceive the parents. A school that gets an A on its cumulative standardized school wide test could have a great number of high achievers or a high number of students who were able to show improvement.

That means that a school of students who are averaging below grade level performance could simply raise their achievement levels a grade and the entire school receives an extremely high grade. This is not an accurate portrait of how a school is performing. If all of those students were failing last year and now they are performing just below grade level this year, the improvement is how the grade is calculated. In other words, a high achieving school with above grade level performers looks the same on paper as a failing school that was able to motivate enough students to simply improve.

This problem has many parents looking for answers outside of the school system. Parents are looking for tutors to help their kids understand their homework. Parents are placing their kids into night and summer schools that keep a child's learning active. But, one solution has proven to be even more effective than all the others. Parents aren't going off the wall when they look for art workshops to help their students learn.

When a child starts to explore her creative side, she opens herself up to other ways of learning. Ways that start to intertwine themselves across the education curriculum. A student performing low in math will learn how to teach herself, and with that her grades will improve on their own. It's like a new world becomes accessible to her, doors of reasoning are easily opened.

Art impacts the cognitive abilities in such a way. That's because art is not repetition and memorization. It forces people to discovery. Solving problems and learning how to learn are the result of exploring artistic expression. Adults have found art to be therapeutic and empowering. Experiencing art is recreational as well as productive. But, the creative process is far more rewarding educationally than memorizing facts and repeating low-level math processes.

With schools failing to give our children what they desperately need, parents are going to have to be educated about the benefits of art to the learning process. Art workshops can fill in the gaps where schools are breaking down. When parents learn that art will greatly benefit their children, art workshops will flourish across the country. Knowing this is coming, wouldn't you want to learn how to get ahead of the trend and start your own art workshop?


Related Tags: learning, artist, artists, school, creative, create, art, arts, workshops, schools, workshop, artistic

An internationally known artist as well as a mother of six, Rivky Shimon founded Rivky's Art Workshop in Brooklyn, New York. Rivky's step-by-step method for teaching children how to create and enjoy art has earned high praise from students, teachers and parents alike. Through her new training series, Rivky plans to teach artists from across the country how to duplicate her success. Not only to ensure that art education remains a vital part of every child's life, but also to enforce the reality that "The Rivky Method" tm works the same magic for adults as well.

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