Why art education?

Kunal Chakravarty

Director - Communications & Fundraising

AFAL

At Akshara, we strongly believe that the Arts are an integral part of an individual’s well-being as they foster the young to become sensitive and compassionate adults. Artistic interventions and experiences help children engage more intimately with themselves, their surroundings and the world at large. The Arts create an environment of equality where children absorb knowledge, develop skills and express themselves freely without fear or prejudice, thus empowering them.

Another driving force that makes us lean heavily on the Arts is the fact that a majority of our students are either first-generation school-goers or first-generation English learners. We are also an inclusive school, which means that every class has a mix of students with varied intellectual and physical abilities.

Thus, text-based education and cookie-cutter lesson plans are not something we can rely on and we have to find artistic ways to ensure our learners remain engaged and excited about their learning processes, feeling motivated and encouraged to learn, no matter what their learning level maybe. Thus, we integrate the arts into our curriculum along with incorporating various artistic engagements throughout the week within school hours.

Art education and the arts in education, both teach us to element the idea of competition, which has, unfortunately, become an intrinsic part of education today, especially in India. We nurture the idea of working towards self-improvement, comparing your previous grades to your current grades, from a very young age instead of focussing on the comparison of the same with peers and unrealistic one-size-fits-all benchmarks, which is only always discouraging.

We have been very successful in changing the mindset of students as well as their parents in this regard and we see a generation of happy learners at our school who do not feel the unnecessary pressure that the education system offsets. Art is about making an idea into a reality. There isn't a single crafted or manufactured object that didn't pass through an artist's hands. That is art's life skill. It applies to everything from the telling of a story, to the functioning of a home, to the building of a business".

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