For 3 hours every week, students in my daughter's public elementary school leave their homeroom classroom to be with students across all grade levels and explore different art themes in small groups. They call this time Arts Focus. Themes include kinetic art, weaving, sewing, photography, drawing, sewing, painting, paper, global beats, 3D art, art and tech among other themes. The whole program is taught by parent volunteers and some themes stay the same and some change every year. Parents commit to teaching a course based on previous curriculum and their particular passions and skill levels. Every year the themes change depending on parents skills and passions. This year there was a parent who is a playwright, so they added a performance and art class.

This focus on art keeps the parents and students alive, while teachers get a chance to plan. There is a buzz in the air when arts focus is about to begin in the semester and students travel across grade levels to learn new themes. It is a massive coordination exercise and it is all done by parent volunteers.

Art stretches the brain and is a metaphor for life and learning. Art says be creative, feel, and explore. Art says be fearless. Art is about about honoring the work of the heart and moving with the energy and feeling.

I was recently at the ocean and I am always amazed with how free children feel there. It is harder to find this freedom as an adult, but I can find it sometimes when I look at a sunset, sit quietly, or laugh hysterically. I believe art is yet another form of freedom that can be tool for children to use for the rest of their lives. To help them decompress. To help them solve a problem. To help them explore. To help them try again and not worry about failure. The process for how we do art should be protected and kept sacred.

I also understand there are levels to mastery. I know technique and skill and experienced teachers and mentors matter deeply and take art to profound levels. However, it is a very different thing if a student is driving the need for further technique and mastery versus an expectation or a structure being imposed on the child. How art is taught matters. When it is taught in a child's life matters. Who is making the choices for what they do or don't do matters.

I have seen this lesson first hand with my daughter--when she produces art on her own when no one is looking something magical is produced. It is usually produced quietly in the corner on any sort of paper or wall or cup or anything she finds and then she quietly put it up on a wall or surface that she chooses. However, when even the slightest expectation is placed on her, she feels this ever so subtle anxiety to perform and I see the ever so slightest hints of disconnection with art and herself. She has always found art naturally in her life, and I hope she always can.

I sometimes ask myself why I care so much about this. Maybe it's because I didn't really find that pathway to art. Yet I also feel I found my own form of art in service to others where I feel this freedom in my work. I think it's because art is one of the few things left in life where we are free. Maybe playing. Maybe music. Maybe nature. I hope we do not take that from children in our obsession of doing more, doing it faster, or doing it better. I worry when expectations or too much structure is imposed on children too early, as I worry they will stop doing this for themselves and start doing this to meet other people's expectations.

My dear friend and heart-driven teacher Marie shared this quote with me by Roger Rosenblatt and I thought it captured the theme of art and life so well:

“The best in art and life comes from a center – something urgent and powerful, an idea or emotion that insists on its being. From that insistence, a shape emerges and creates its structure out of passion. If you begin with a structure, you have to make up the passion, and that’s a very hard thing to do.”

I hope more schools do art to provide holistic education for all students, balancing social-emotional learning with academic learning and including the A in STEAM. We have seen that academics actually can increase in these environments where art is integrated throughout the curriculum (not just as one activity or class), and we see this in the data of my daughter’s school very clearly. The brain stretches and the brain relaxes. The heart gets excited. The heart is free. The heart wants to go to school. And from this point children can learn. The experts call this self-determination theory and it is one theory of learning anchored in intrinsic motivation.

Once learning belongs to children, I feel they want more and more of it, not for external recognition, but for the sake of learning.

How beautiful to see children learn about life and themselves in this way, and how beautiful for us to learn from them.