Why Should We Include Visual Arts in Educational Curriculum?

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Children are innately creative and imaginative and they try to bring this aspect into their play and work (whether they are on the streets of Mumbai or in an Australian classroom). Art encourages this creativity and imagination in young children and adults. Traditional curriculum (represented by the brown half of the butterfly) without Creative arts is dry (like the parched soil), unimaginative and dull and it sucks out this creativity and imagination out of the students. Just like a butterfly that blends into its surroundings with closed wings (with its brown underside), students lose their uniqueness, spontaneity and vibrancy with the test-result oriented curriculum and become individuals that are part of the crowd. Like the water that transforms the dry, parched, unremarkable soil into a lush, vibrant, colourful landscape full of growth and life, Creative Arts spices up the bland curriculum (represented by the colourful half of the butterfly) and converts the process of learning into a fun, vibrant, thriving activity that reveals the uniqueness, creativity and imagination of individuals. It sprouts playfulness, originality, inventiveness, resourcefulness and resilience in students and sets them on a path of discovery and adventure about themselves. Arts promote insight and understanding about our subjective inner life and enable us to see things with different eyes (Langer as cited in Gibson & Ewing, 2011). Robinson (1999) in his report says that all people have creative abilities in varying degrees and creativity is possible in all areas of human activity, including the arts, sciences, at work, at play and in all other areas of daily life. According to him, the discovery of creative strengths by individuals can have an enormous impact on their self-esteem and overall achievement. The result of a creative learning process is a nourished individual with a unique

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