Guest Blog by -Kira Lynn Cain, artist and educator (VIBE PDX, Brentwood Art Center (Los Angeles), ArtCenter College of Design) Kira teaches Illustration, Drawing, and Character Development for Vibe.

The benefits of visual arts education on children’s development is broad and lasting, and in some cases, surprising. Not only does exposure to art, teaching artists, and art-making experiences bring pleasure, it creates increased engagement with life goals, empathy, and motivation for success.

Research literature and interviews across multiple institutions indicate that arts education has a positive effect on social-emotional development, civic engagement and empathy for others, as well as motivation for personal and academic success. Interest in academic subjects improves with arts education in public schools.1

Engaging students with art results in an increase in empathy, patience, and a habit of iterative refinement. It fosters skills including non-judgmental observation. By refining the lines in a portrait, the person drawing refines how the subject is seen and defined. By this process of iterative refinement, empathy increases and becomes a habit. Imagining the feelings and experiences of others becomes a habit. Using creative solutions to observe and refine definitions and outcomes in learning situations becomes a habit and a skill.

The nonprofit Americans for the Arts states “Numerous reports discuss the ways that increased access and involvement in arts education encourage students to stay in school, succeed in school, succeed in life, and succeed in work.2”

Brookings published a study in 2019 titled New evidence of the benefits of arts education, written by Brian Kisida and Daniel H. Bowen.

The Brookings Study found improvements in:

school engagement
college aspirations
inclinations to draw upon works of art as a means for empathizing with others

A New York Times article titled Using Arts Education to Help Other Lessons Stick quotes Paul T. Sowden, a professor of psychology at the University of Winchester in England: “…arts education, he said, is a chance to build resilience and determination in children, as well as to help them master complex skills.3”

“Artists try to make a gift of what they have felt,” he says. “What they have felt is the aggregate of what they have seen, and so it includes their own imaginings of what others have thought and felt.4” -Jesse Ball novelist and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

1 https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2019/02/12/new-evidence-of-the-benefits-of-arts-education/

2 https://www.americansforthearts.org/by-topic/arts-education

3 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/well/family/using-arts-education-to-help-other-lessons-stick.html

4 https://www.saic.edu/news/marketing-communications/art-empathy-0

Visual Arts Education Has Measurable Benefits