Providing a decent place for arts in our schools may be one of the most important first steps we can take to bring about genuine school reform.  (Eisner 1992)

 The purpose of this paper is to address how a new emphasis on the arts in curriculum is necessary if our schools are to produce adults of the twenty-first century who are perceptive, flexible, creative, adaptable and, most of all, able to solve problems and make decisions in a multiplicity of personal and professional situations as yet unimagined.  It is essential that our schools provide experiences that stimulate the imagination and pose problems that require creative solutions.  The unique properties of art (not always inherent in other academic subjects) enhance the development of the creative and intuitive thinking process towards fully functioning individuals who will cope with the challenges of our evolving culture.

 The notion of culture includes several aspects of people's lives of which one aspect is technology.  A technological phenomenon that is currently becoming an extremely popular development is multimedia.  This industry has many implications for the arts and for the job market that is open to creative individuals.  Canada's multimedia industry is rapidly emerging.  More and more business corporations realize that they must recruit artists to assist in the design and creation of multimedia products and services.  The arts are seen by computer communicators as being the engine to promote other Canadian industries in the global marketplace.

 Multimedia is a type of presentation that involves the directed control of several forms of communications such as text display, graphics, still imagery, animation, sound and music.  A multimedia presentation is a composite of many audio-visual sources and allows the discriminating viewer to proceed at a desired pace and with some level of interaction.  The user controls the order and speed of the presentation.  With some systems the user, or viewer, can import information from various sources, merging them into a new assembly or package, thus creating a new presentation, product or service.  Multimedia can be sold as products or services, and it is also used to produce these products or services.

 Canadian companies having a successful background in corporate communications understand the value of artists in the emerging market place.  President Matthew Diamond of Digital Presentations expresses the view of many:
 

 Our focus as a company is now on creativity and recruiting artists who are acquainted with the new technology and possess the skills to use it.  Campbell (1993), p. 14.

Michael Keefe, director of multimedia, Multiple Images Inc. comments,

 As cultural - and other - multimedia products and services become more and more refined, artists' skill and imagination provide what is often a subtle but critical improvement in the presentation.  This improvement becomes the competitive edge in the information-glutted marketplace.  (Campbell, 1993:  14)

 We are on the threshold of a new age - a high tech information age where there is the greatest explosion of knowledge in the history of mankind.  Information is proliferating at a phenomenal rate and information processing has become the backbone of a whole new era.  Storing, retrieving, creating, distributing and exchanging information, using tools of high technology, are now important aspects of our economy and the foci of many jobs which did not exist a decade ago.

 The computer is an instrument central to the late twentieth century methods of work and play.  It is still in a state of technological infancy.  Yet, just as the steam engine spurred the industrial revolution, so has the micro-chip launched us into the technological revolution.  The invention of interactive multimedia has allowed computers to become a creative environment - a new medium - for discovering the human interweave of ideas.  This new media environment challenges our educational systems to meet the needs of society.  This will mean altering our goals to reflect the changing needs.

 Specific skills and knowledge areas must be developed, added to, or emphasized in our school curriculum in order to prepare our students to perform adequately in the high technology information age.  With a focus on developing skills for lifelong learning, information processing skills, and with computer proficiency as the guiding light, our curriculum planners may be successful in exposing today's students to the "new basics"  (Caissy, 1989).

 Because of the rapid change in society and the workplace, education and learning are no longer confined to the years spent in school.  Current high school graduates may have to change their jobs four or five times.  Updating job skills and retraining are quite common occurrences.  Students must be equipped with skills that allow them to fulfil current job requirements and to adapt to new ones.  Students must develop a base of learning and thinking skills that will enable them to become independent learners and will allow them to apply, transfer and use skills in a variety of circumstances and settings.  These ideas are not new - but the development of these skills has been limited.

 Toffler (1990), Naisbett (1990), Postman (1992), and others writing about social change, see a growing need on the part of workers for more creativity, problem solving skills, perceptual development and evaluation skills.  In our economy today innovative techniques for bringing new products on line are necessary for our survival.  Innovation demands that ideas are free flowing, which in turn requires that workers need to be creative and well educated.  Worker ideas are eagerly sought by many companies.  The "innovation imperative", as Toffler (1990) called it, requires a diversity of ideas for survival.  In a society where new fragmentations and new forms of synthesis occur often, both workers and leaders need to develop the ability to cope by becoming more comfortable with ambiguity and less fearful of the unknown.  A person with the ability to demonstrate art knowledge and art proficiency will have a better chance of procuring employment in the workplace of the future.

 At the Arts Work Conference, Toronto (1992), Professor Ken Robinson addressed the topic The Neglect of Arts in Schools.  He argued for the range of complex and related roles that the arts fulfil in the whole curriculum.  These include:
 

 (a) Developing the full variety of children's intelligence.

  ...The arts are fundamental ways of organizing our understanding of the world and call on profound qualities of discipline and insight.  They must be included in education wherever schools are concerned to develop the full range of children's intelligence and abilities.

 (b) Developing the capacity for creative thought and action.

  As the rate of change accelerates in all areas of social life, two qualities in young people are becoming more important - those of capability and adaptability ... Industry and commerce want those entering employment to show powers of innovation, initiative and application in solving problems and pursuing opportunities.  These are widely held to be prerequisites for economic health.  For the growing numbers of those for whom conventional employment is ceasing to be an option, these powers may be more important.  Creative thought and action should be fostered in all areas of education.  In the arts they are central.

 (c) The exploration of values.

  Feelings are intimately concerned with values.  Many for example are considered as vices or virtues - lust, envy, hope, despair, etc.  The education of feelings is thus concerned with moral issues and the exploration of values.  An education which sets out to help young people make sense of - and contribute to - the world in which they live must be concerned with helping them to investigate their own values and those of others.  Artists are characteristically concerned with such things; with the evaluation and the re-evaluation of the world around them.

 (d) The education of feeling and sensibility.

  No sensible person would doubt the value of intellectual activity and development.  The danger lies in the separation of this from other capabilities.  Mainstream Western philosophy since the seventeenth century has held that feelings and emotions disrupt the pursuit of knowledge through the intellect and should be disregarded in the classroom.  Some have argued against this that the free expression of emotion is essential to healthy development, and this is the value of the arts in the schools.  Both views divide intellect from emotion, thus neglecting the intimate relationships between them.  The arts are not outpourings of emotion.  They are disciplined forms of inquiry and expression that help to organize feelings and ideas about experience.  The need for young people to do this, rather than just to give vent to emotions or to have them ignored, must be responded to in schools.  The arts provide the natural means for this.

 (e) Understanding cultural change and differences.

  The arts are characteristic expressions of any culture and evolve as part of it.  In a multicultural society, schools have important responsibilities with regard to cultural education.  The arts are important here for two reasons.  First, both the practical and the discriminating enjoyment of the arts involve observation, analysis, and evaluation of personal and social experience.  Second, the products of the arts - plays, paintings, literature, music, dancing, sculpture, and so on - are integral parts of the social culture and are among those things children need to experience in coming to understand it.

 (f) Developing physical and perceptual skills.

  Children need to be enabled not only to have ideas about the world, but to act on it.  Natural abilities must be developed of a range of qualities and skills with a wide application and value.

 Fairly recent, but now familiar, research on brain hemisphericity (Sperry, 1975; Bogen 1975; Orstein 1973) substantiates the importance of developing imagination and divergent thought processes.  Research into the psychology of the brain suggests that two hemispheres of the brain are involved in different but related forms of perception and conception.  One summary of this thesis is given by Ornstein (1975) who suggests that:
 

 The left hemisphere is largely involved in the analytical, logical thinking, especially in verbal and mathematical functions.  Its mode or operation is primarily linear.  This hemisphere tends to process information sequentially.  The right hemisphere is involved in orientation in space and recognition of faces.  It processes information more diffusely and is more rationally simultaneous in its mode of operation.

 These two sets of functions are complementary.  The implication is not that education should now become right-brained.  It is that equal emphasis should be placed on the capacities of both hemispheres and the relationships between them.  Carl Sagan (1979) makes this point forcibly:
 

 There is no way to tell whether the patterns extracted by the right hemisphere are real or imagined without subjecting them to left hemisphere scrutiny.  On the other hand, mere critical thinking without creative and intuitive insights and search for new patterns, is sterile or doomed.  To solve complex problems in changing circumstances requires the activity of both cerebral hemispheres.  The path to the future lies through the corpus callosum.

 Betty Edwards (1979), author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, has been conducting research using art to unlock right-brain potential.  Results of her studies imply that training in art might be used as a means of teaching students to improve their perceptual skills and to utilize more fully their right-hemisphere capabilities.  Schools must provide a climate in which both sides of the brain are cherished and nourished.  Some learning calls for logical, analytical thinking.  However, computers and data banks can hold more information than one mind ever could, and it is here that the ability to think creatively and with feeling will be crucial in the child's future.

 In the Betrayal of Youth, James Hemmings (1980) observes that education is dominated by the "academic illusion", the idea that:
 

 The supreme role of education is the development of the logical, intellectual, analytic aspects of the mind and that other aspects, the social, perceptive, affective, practical, intuitive, aesthetic, imaginative and creative aspects are of minor importance - worth a nod or two here or there but to be valued as nothing beside the glories of academic excellence.

 This is not an argument against academic education - it is an argument against the confusion of academic ability in general.  Academic ability involves the capacity for logical - deductive reason and for propositional knowledge.  These are important abilities, but there is more to a child's mind than these alone.

 Eisner (1992:  594) states that the core contributions of the arts and their potential role in furthering the aims of education as follows:
 

 1. Not all problems have single correct answers.

  One of the important lessons that the arts teach is that solutions to problems take many forms.  This lesson from the arts world would not be so important were not the fact that so much of what is taught in school teaches just the opposite lesson.  Almost all of the basic skills taught in the primary grades teach children that there is only once correct answer to any question and only one correct solution to any problem.  The arts teach a different lesson.  They celebrate imagination, multiple perspectives, and the importance of personal interpretation.  The last thing a modern teacher in art wants is a class full of standardized performances on a given task.  When the curriculum as a whole is so heavily saturated with tasks and expectations that demand fealty to rule, opportunities to think in a unique way are diminished.  When carried to an extreme the school's program becomes intellectually debilitating.

 2. The form of a thing is part of its content.

  We have a tendency in our schools to separate form from content.  Form is regarded as the shape something takes, and content is the meaning something conveys.  As Dewey pointed out, perception ceases when recognition begins.  Assigning a label to an entity is an act of categorization and exploration of their uniqueness stops.  The arts, however, teach the child that the grass is not simply green:  it is lavender, grey and gold.  And when it is green its varieties are endless.  In the arts and in very much of life, the form something takes is very much part of its content.  In fact what the content is often depends on the form it takes.  Eisner accepts the fact that some of the features the arts possess are also found in the sciences.  The products of science have their own aesthetic features:  the parsimony of theory, the beauty of conceptual models, the elegance of experiments, and the imagination and insight of interpretation.  The point Eisner makes is that the difference between the arts and the sciences is in the context of creation.  A work of science is a work of art.

 3. Having fixed objectives and pursuing clear-cut methods for achieving them are not always the most rational way of dealing with the world.  The arts teach that goals need to be flexible and that surprise counts:  that chance, as Aristotle wisely remarked, is something that art loves; that being open to the unanticipated opportunities that inevitably emerge in the context of action increases insight; and that purposeful flexibility rather than rigid adherence to prior plans is more likely to yield something of value.

  In the context of much of today's schooling, the lessons taught by the arts are closer to what successful and intelligent corporations do and to what cognitive psychologists are discovering constitute the most sophisticated forms of thinking.  These recent psychological discoveries are lessons artists have long understood.  What are these lessons?  They are that solving complex problems require attention discrete to wholes, not simply to parts:  that most complex problems have no algorithms solutions; that nuance counts; and that purposes and goals must remain flexible in order to exploit opportunities that one cannot foresee.

  The problems in life are much like the problems encountered in the arts.  They are problems that are often subtle, occasionally ambiguous, and sometimes dilemma-like.  One would think that schools that wanted to prepare students for life would employ tasks and problems similar to those found outside of schools.  This is hardly the case.  Life outside of school is seldom like school assignments - and hardly ever - like a multiple choice test.

 4. In addition to their expressive function, the arts perform another function of critical importance.

  That contribution hinges on a distinction between expression and discovery.  In the arts, students learn that some kinds of meaning may require the expressive forms that the arts make possible.  The arts provide the forms through which insight and feeling can emerge in the public world.

  But the arts also make discovery possible.  Discovery occurs as students learn through adventures in the arts something of the possibilities of human experiences.  The arts can help students find their individual capacity to feel and imagine.

  The arts more than most fields, put a premium on activities that can help students discover the special qualities of experience we call aesthetic.

 Culture ought to include significant opportunities for students to experience the arts and to learn to use them to create a life worth living.  Art is a part of the cultural heritage of every society.  The arts can make an impact on a scale that is literally worldwide.  Our culture regards the arts as among the highest of human achievements.  We build places we call museums to display the fruits of artistic inquiry and construct concert halls to experience the heights we can reach through music, drama and dance.  Yet we provide little place for them in our schools.  Approximately 80% of all secondary students never enrol in a fine arts course and we are being told by such writers as Allan Bloom (1987) and E.D. Hirsch (1987) that students, even those in prestigious universities, are culturally illiterate.

 If one were to produce a report card for Newfoundland schools the place of arts in the curriculum would reflect a low level of priority in comparison to other areas of the curriculum.  Our High Schools are still expected to priorize within the norms of math and science above all else.  While art and drama are integral to every high school's list of courses available, it is a fact of life that those classes are filled with the low-academic non-achiever type.  The question one must ask is WHY?  - why deny our top students exposure to the arts?  The answer lies with the increased emphasis placed on raising the level of statistical performance in math and science of our Newfoundland students in comparison to national norms.  While no one wishes to down play the relevant importance of math and science in today's changing society, it is imperative that the benefits of exposure to the arts be given equal recognition.  This situation is compounded by the fact that curriculum decision makers themselves are a product of a past environment with a very limited exposure to the arts.  The result of access denied is a program of education that leaves most students unable to participate in the arts.  Artistic literacy is a rare educational commodity.

 Like the young child in awe of the miracle of the emerging bean plants, we look with wonder towards a rapidly unfolding future.  Children of today and teachers preparing for their profession will shortly advance into the 21st century and the education they receive will need to prepare them for unknown social changes and technological advances.  Only through a multifaceted education program that develops divergent thinking - that encourages intuitive as well as rational thought processes - can today's younger learner begin to be prepared to cope with the rapidly changing aspects of a technologically oriented world.  The information age changes are dictating that art programs are essential.  In educational reform a richer nurturant culture can be created for our students if they are given the opportunity to experience the arts.

 Powerfully, Tennyson closes Ulysses' epic quest for knowledge of the world in body, mind and spirit:
 

 ...to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield - Tennyson.

 That same theme is relevant today as educators enable students to understand more about themselves in the third millennium techno-culture.

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