Why do the arts matter?
My wife has just returned from Algeria, which sent me back to Camus’s The Plague (La Peste), the 1947 novel about an Algerian town in the grip of a deadly epidemic – the bubonic plague. It is an allegory of France’s suffering under Nazi occupation, and also a story of bravery and determination in the face of the precariousness of human existence. It is still a good story, even if, to an Englishman’s taste, some of the French philosophising is both wordy and obscure.
Reading more about Camus, I found the lecture he gave at Uppsala on 14 December 1957, four days after receiving the Nobel Prize. Known in English as “Create Dangerously”, it argues that artists cannot stand apart from society: they must accept both the freedom and the responsibility that come with making art.
Camus uses a great deal of metaphor, and part of the difficulty of The Plague is working out what his stories are meant to mean. While writing it, he noted in his notebook that “the problem in art is a problem of translation.” It seems to me that this is what the arts are largely about: translating ideas and feelings so that other people can understand them.
One could argue that religion and meditation have a similar purpose, albeit, for believers, a transcendental one, but for now I will stick to the arts. If you believe that art, music and drama can communicate feelings in a way that enlightens people and enriches their experience, then it matters that every child learns to understand the medium/media.
A child who has never really looked at a painting sees nothing more than wall decoration. Perhaps many of us only see that most of the time. When you first take a child round a gallery, it is much more fun to give them a task: find the sheep, count the types of animal, see how often the sun appears. Any exercise like that helps a child look at what is going on in a painting and begin to engage with it.
That is what we are now doing in 29 of our schools with Art in Schools. Each week a different picture appears on a screen in school, with questions attached. Surprisingly quickly, children’s relationship with pictures changes, and not only with the one on the screen. They start to ask what is going on, what the artist saw, and why the artist painted in a way that is different from a photograph. One Year 5 girl told us, “At lunchtime, when we don’t have anything to talk about, it’s nice to talk about the paintings.” After seeing Rousseau’s Tiger in a Tropical Storm, a pupil at another school wrote, “It made me feel concerned for the tiger.” From there it is a short leap to asking why a picture matters, what is it communicating, and older children begin to wrestle with the question Camus poses: is art an exercise in translation?
For the more musically minded, it is easier to see how feelings follow from listening. Whether it is Freddie Mercury of Queen wrestling with his demons in Bohemian Rhapsody, or Mozart singing with passion about love or death, any listener is quickly caught up in the emotions the music stirs. The same is true of watching an opera or going to a play: the concentration and the feelings that follow are an experience that can change lives.
I do not think children are ever too young to start. Babies can hear music before they are born, and from a very early age children engage with colours, symbols and signs. We have started singing workshops with pre-school groups; nobody is too young or too old to enjoy opera! What matters is that children keep receiving a range of stimuli and, as they grow, get the chance to learn the techniques and skills that let their understanding and appreciation grow with their minds.
Education that only teaches by rote and repetition, or narrows to just reading, writing and arithmetic, cannot stretch and excite young minds. The Gove reforms may have been necessary, and it may be right to keep a focus on academic standards, but not at the expense of developing the whole person: people who can empathise, who understand emotions and feelings, who can translate them through art, music, drama, dance and oracy, and who can receive and understand other people’s ideas and our shared history and culture. There is so much more to learning in the arts than colouring in.
Cotswolds Arts Through Schools delivers professional arts education to over 14,000 children across 80 state primary schools in Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, and Warwickshire. To find out more, visit cotswoldsartsthroughschools.com
