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Educating for the Workplace
through the Arts
Getty Education Institute for the Arts
(Excerpts from Business Week, October 28, 1996.)

How the Arts Strengthen the Workplace

John Brademas, former Congressman and president emeritus of New York University, provided the ACA Louisville Conference with a three-point rationale for why and how arts education strengthens the workplace.

The arts enhance qualities business needs. The indispensable qualities and characteristics for developing the kind of workforce America needs are, in Bradema's words, "exactly the competencies that are animated and enhanced through study and practice of the arts." They are also generic, i.e., transferable to other topics and other areas of life.

The arts invigorate the process of learning. Arts education is education that focuses on "doing;" all the arts are related to either product or performance, and often both. The arts are also strongly linked to positive academic performance. Citing a four-year study conducted by the Arts Education Research Center at New York University, Brademas noted that achievement test scores in academic subjects improve when the arts are used to assist learning in mathematics, creative writing, and communication skills.

The arts embrace and encourage school participation, especially for youngsters who are at risk. Brademas pointed to the "Fighting Back" project sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which targets drug and alcohol use among the young. He noted that "participation in the arts programs can be a powerful magnet to keep children in school."

Source: John Brademas, Remarks, American Council on the "Arts Education for the 21st Century American Economy," Louisville, September 16, 1994.

Value Added: How Arts Education Builds the Skills That Business Values
  • An education in the arts encourages high achievement.
  • Study of the arts encourages a suppleness of mind, a toleration for ambiguity, a taste for nuance, and the ability to make trade-offs among alternative courses of action.
  • Study of the arts helps students to think and work across traditional disciplines. They learn both to integrate knowledge and to "think outside the boxes."
  • An education in the arts teaches students how to work cooperatively.
  • An education in the arts builds an understanding of diversity and multi-cultural dimensions of the world.
  • An arts education insists on the value of content, which helps students understand "quality" as a key value.
  • An arts education contributes to technological competence.
How an Arts Education Connects Young People to Their Culture and Civilization
  • An arts education speaks to and helps children build the capabilities that help them grow as unique individuals.
  • An education in the arts helps children experience and understand their cultural heritage.
  • An arts education teaches children how to navigate the broad river of meaning.
  • An arts education provides children with an avenue to the incomparable.
Thinking Skills in the Arts Curriculum
  • Arts education encourages nonalgorithmic reasoning, i.e., a path of thinking and action that is not specified in advance, a characteristic that often leads to novel solutions.
  • Arts education trains students in complex thinking, i.e., thinking in which the path from beginning to end is not always visible from the outset or from any specific vantage point - as, for instance, when a student learns a piece of music, or has to solve unforeseen problems with the use of materials.
  • Arts education encourages thinking that yields multiple rather than unique solutions, as when an actor tries different ways of portraying a character, each with its own costs and benefits.
  • An arts education asks students to use multiple criteria creating a work of art, which sometimes conflict with each other, as when artistic goals fight with clarity of communication.
  • Arts education involves thinking that is laced with uncertainty. Not everything that bears on the task is known, for example, whether a particular kind of paint will achieve the desired artistic effect.
  • Arts education requires self-regulation of the thinking process itself, as when students are forced to make interim assessments of their work, self-correct, or apply external standards.
  • Arts education involves learning how to impose meaning, finding structure in apparent disorder, as when purpose emerges from seemingly random movements in a modern dance.
  • Arts education also involves nuanced judgment and interpretation, as when playwrights work to find exactly the right words to establish a character, signal a turn of plot, or achieve an emotional effect.
Source: Lauren B. Resnick, Education and Learning to Think, Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1987.


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