The Sunday News
Arts Focus, Rasiedon Baya
IT’S now official. The arts are now part of the school curriculum, not just as an appendage or an after-thought. Now schools can officially timetable arts related subjects during the day and side by side with other subjects like Mathematics, English and Geography.
We have definitely come a long way and perhaps now our education system can produce graduates creative and innovative enough to fit into the global world. While it has not been easy to be where we are now and have the arts as part and parcel of the syllabus our belief is that the bigger struggle is yet to come. Our biggest challenge will be how to make it work and, especially, to convince those that have been and continue to be sceptical about the arts in general. We need to convince these that the arts are good not only for the child’s cognitive growth but that they also have physical and emotional benefits as well.
Now that the arts — theatre, dance, music, visual arts, are being taught to students at a very young age we foresee a brighter future for the arts sector itself. In a few years from now we shall be confidently talking about a strong base for creativity, cultural awareness and development in our country. We applaud Dr. Dokora and his ministry for this development. They have taken the arts to another level and ensured the long term survival of the sector. Two weeks into the term and we wait, with bated breath, for the reaction of parents, students, and school authorities on the new developments.
News in Bulawayo is that a few schools have taken the challenge and have already introduced some arts subjects. Our interest being mainly theatre arts we are aware that less than ten schools have introduced the subject in their schools. This could be due to several reasons, some of which are the fact that there are few resources to teach some of the subjects. School heads with no teachers trained to teach the arts and with little or no resources are reluctant to introduce arts subjects. They are afraid of plunging into the dark.
However, this lack of resources and even teaching personnel should be seen as an opportunity by the arts community.
Experienced artistes must take the opportunity and start creating resource material for schools. Perhaps it’s now also time for theatre arts, music, visual arts and dance graduates from various colleges and universities who had found other careers to come back and start working in the field they trained for.
The other reason could be the obvious one. School heads and teachers having a negative attitude towards the arts. The arts were stigmatised a long time ago. It is a public secret that most people don’t view the arts as a respectable career choice. So it would be folly to expect an attitude that have been in existence for years to just melt away just because a minister has made the teaching of arts official in schools. We still need to work hard on these negative attitudes. With good results and a positive outlook we shall convince many in the future. The few schools that have introduced arts education must immediately start working on promoting a proper understanding of arts education among students, teachers and parents and other schools, especially about what is proper arts education and its importance in the general education and growth of the child or the learner.
We believe there should be continuous workshops and engagement with schools, communities, arts educators, and artistes themselves in development relevant resources, experiences and even spaces for our children to grow artistically. Government must go all out and inform the people why it believes in the importance of arts education.
Government, through its various teachers’ colleges, must start training teachers who will come and teach the arts in schools. Schools themselves must start preparing spaces good enough to make the learning of arts enjoyable. It would be embarrassing to have all arts related learning being done in the open school grounds. Part of the learning must be about art appreciation and the respect of the art itself.
Arts education, if properly introduced, shall provide learners with the space and environment for engaging in creative processes and the development of individual talents. It shall also improve the quality of education. The key word being quality. Quality education is always learner-centred and is always defined by three principles:
That the education must be relevant to the learner but must also provide universal values.
That the education is equitable in terms of access and outcomes and guarantees social inclusion for learners.
That the education must reflects and help to fulfill individual rights.
