what is arts and humanities essay

what is arts and humanities essay

Importance of Arts and Humanities Education

1. Introduction

This assignment will discuss the importance of humanities and arts and the different ways of interpreting them and learning them. The use of arts and music will be identified as an effective method to help remember events and dates throughout history. Learning from past mistakes and events to understand our future has been an objective through engaging different forms of arts. This concept of learning from the past is important in understanding the humanities, as we can recreate the situations and events which took place to learn where we went wrong and how to learn from those mistakes. The interpretation was known to be very dry and dull as students would be spoon-fed information and then answering questions. However, with the use of art and its resources, students can now visualize the past through re-enactment or color a picture of a past event, and the future generation can now have conceptual ideas on what had happened. This could effectively create those who want to avoid the same mistakes.

Sometimes our ideas and freeing ourselves from tradition show creative impression in terms of arts and humanities knowledge. The wisdom of using a way of expressing ourselves through different shades of colors by using any forms of art and realizing the nature of language with its literature to redefine the truth or just to explore a boundless imagination for personal satisfaction is known as the language and art of interpreting the lives of ourselves and the universe. Education is a passion for knowledge that begins with the first step through the process of learning, understanding, and applying. In arts and humanities, education through the learning process will demonstrate the vision and the real form of educating human beings.

2. Benefits of Arts and Humanities Education

The majority of the benefits of arts and humanities education have to do with the fact that the same is a most important practice to be instrumental in improving the quality of life. It also is evidence of a major contribution to the nation’s economy. It has become a fact that arts education is one of the major building blocks in the development of the brain and critical thinking, as it enhances the neural systems that produce a broad spectrum of benefits other than specific skills learned during a specified period of time. This, in turn, drastically increases the learning capabilities of the individual involved. This has been a proven factor due to the fact that arts education is making its way back into the curriculums of schools throughout the world. It has been noted that low-income communities, in particular, are looking to seek improvements in their schools by way of electing for more programs involving various forms of arts education.

Skills learned in arts and other humanities courses have the uncanny ability to be used alongside skills learned in other subjects to great effect. For example, writing skills are essential in any subject and many, myself included, feel that they were principally developed in English and similar classes. More specific to the arts are skills surrounding analysis and critical thinking. The study of the humanities, above all, seeks to draw out why the subject in question is important and how it affects our society today. This line of thinking is very important in any kind of research and is highly sought after. The ability to analyze a piece of text, a musical score, or even an event will be paramount in a wide range of professions, from the obvious historian to a lawyer presenting a case to a businessman trying to make a sale.

3. Role of Arts and Humanities in Society

Rick Detweiler addressed this issue in the Journal of Higher Education, proposing a symbolic bestiary to illustrate the traits of the employable person: the chameleon and the computer. In the view of employers, job seekers need to become all things to all people, able to change colors and blend in wherever they go, and skilled in the operation of complex electronic systems. Detweiler goes on to describe the humanities type person who is a capable sharer in the human experience, an interpreter of texts, an unraveller of complexity, and a perceptive appraiser of consequences. It is clear that modern American and global culture lean towards the traits of the chameleon and the machine; however, the latter type person described is very necessary to the state of human condition.

Society is perhaps the most influential factor in determining the acceptance of change. It is a body which evolves through time and change, and which is still very prevalent in its avoidance of arts and humanities. Arts and humanities are acknowledged as central to the education and development of thoughtful, well-rounded citizens. The importance of knowledge from these disciplines is that it will allow humans to think and act more effectively in their home and professional lives. This is inclusive of how problems are solved, including the choice of solutions or professional decisions to be made. This body reflects its desire for more technologically based education, leaving what is referred to as traditional education of causal analysis, opinion formation, and the weighing of consequences “on the back burner”.

4. Challenges and Criticisms

There are several criticisms of the arts and humanities disciplines that have influenced and continue to shape education policies today. The neoliberal emphasis on education as a vehicle for economic growth has resulted in a decreasing tolerance for anything that is not perceived as leading directly to a job in this competitive global market. Students, parents, and educational institutions are increasingly demanding assurance of financial return for time spent on learning. Education philosophies and programs that lack taut measurable outcomes, such as “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” vs the future career of one particular student, are seen as no longer acceptable in a cost-benefit ratio. Future employers are looking for custodians of knowledge and basic technical skills at the cheapest wage possible. Believing this criteria to be right, many companies are outsourcing creative work overseas where it can be done with less pay. Canadian author Richard Florida describes these changes as the shift from the old economy, when ideas and individual human initiative were one of the most valued resources, to the new creative one where the nation’s economic well-being is said to be weighted upon the mental caliber of its workforce.

5. Conclusion

Our major conclusions concerning the first of these objectives are that the student of the arts and humanities has an opportunity to study a well-defined set of human characteristics of fundamental importance to his self-understanding and development. Through the study of philosophy, literature, history, and the arts in general (we have not, of course, exhausted the list of disciplines involved) he will be required to examine those differences between human and brute creation through which he knows himself to be distinct from the other animals, and those aspects of human life which serve to define man’s humanity and to distinguish one human society or culture from another. . .

This book has tried to show that the arts and the humanities are academic disciplines which provide a distinctive contribution to the education of the individual and to a general education of the kind outlined in the first chapters of this report. Such a contribution can be represented in terms of three broad educational objectives: the development of the individual student, the intellectual and social aims of education, and the personal benefits to students resulting from an enjoyable, satisfying and culturally significant educational experience.