Culture Counts: The Case For The Arts And The Humanities In Youth Development

• LEARNING AND ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE
• SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

The arts and the humanities provide critical tools for children and youth as they move through various developmental stages. Preschool children, before they are fluent in language, are powerfully affected by music, visual arts and dance. Preschoolers can paint, color, mold clay, sing songs and dance in order to convey feelings and ideas. These activities encourage young children to express themselves and learn through the use of nonverbal symbols.

Teenagers struggle with issues of identity, independence, competency and social role. The arts help to mediate this confusion. "Creative art activity allows the adolescent to gain mastery over internal and external landscapes by discovering mechanisms for structure and containment that arise from within, rather than being imposed from outside. The artistic experience entails repetition of actions, thoughts or emotions, over which the adolescent gains increased tolerance or mastery. While providing a means to express pain and unfulfilled longings during a distinct maturational phase, the arts simultaneously engage the competent, hopeful and healthy aspects of the adolescent's being."⁹ Similarly, the humanities encourage youth to read, write and express themselves in a disciplined way.

Changes in body image may be expressed through movement and dance. Drama offers the opportunity to explore identity by integrating childhood roles and experimenting with future possibilities. Music expresses emotional dissonance and volatility. The visual arts provide a vehicle for translating inner experiences to outward visual images.¹⁰ Writing and oral history projects bring a greater understanding of one's family and neighborhood.

The arts and the humanities teach the value of discipline and teamwork and the tangible rewards each can bring. When children's efforts culminate in a performance or exhibition, they have a chance to experience meaningful public affirmation, which provides them with some degree of celebrity. For those few minutes, children are in their own eyes every bit as important as anybody-any TV, sports, music, movie or video idol.¹¹ This can be an experience of particular potency for youngsters whose lives are primarily characterized by anonymity and failure.

The arts and the humanities provide youth with a different perspective on their own lives, a chance to imagine a different outcome and to develop a critical distance from everyday life. For one adult poet, a well-known children's book allowed her to envision a different world from the abusive one in which she lived as a child. At a conference for adults learning to read, she recalled this experience, held up Smokey and the Cowhorse and said, "This is the book that saved my life." Victor Swenson, executive director of the Vermont Council on the Humanities, elaborates: "It [the book] represented a world outside of her own circumstances; a world of honor and honesty, love and loyalty and bad luck and good luck. It gave her something outside of her own experience. And she could see that there was a way out."¹²

Developing cultural literacy in children and youth gives them a sense of perspective as they participate in traditions of expression from which they learn and to which they can contribute. As humanist John William Ward wrote in 1985, "[H]umanistic learning is centered on the individual who has important questions about self and society. To learn some of the answers to those questions means the fullest and richest and most imaginative development of every single self."¹³

A respected gang-interventionist writes, "One of the most natural and effective vehicles for gang members is the road of the arts, especially theater. New values only emerge through new experiences, and the arts provide a unique laboratory where truth and possibility can be explored safely. Validating emotional safety is everything."¹⁴

Because dance, music, photography and other visual arts transcend language, they can bridge barriers among cultural, racial and ethnic groups. The arts also can promote a deeper understanding of similarities and differences among religions, races and cultural traditions. For some children, the exploration of their unique cultural histories can be critical to their sense of themselves and to others' images of them. This knowledge can help bind them more fully to the larger society of which they are a part.

Finally, the arts and the humanities are a critical part of a complete education. The true worth of cultural knowledge transcends any of its specific applications. Exposure to the arts and the humanities and the experience of their power are of inestimable value unto themselves. And in this repect , the beauty of the arts and the wisdom of the humanities count for everyone.