Arts Education
The arts-dance, music, theatre, and visual arts-are among humanity's most ancient cultural achievements. Innate and essential elements of our human nature, the arts shape and extend our ability to think about, manipulate, and symbolize our world. As creative languages, the arts sharpen and extend the ability to express, understand, and absorb feelings and ideas. Among the many building blocks of civilization, the arts create, embody, and reveal symbolic structures, ideas, emotions, and expressions that are only available through their specialized forms. Study of the arts provides students with opportunities to deepen their understanding of the world and their place in it. Through imagination, they create worlds of their own; and, as they interact with those worlds, they create and enlarge their own humanity.