Applause for response to new Arts charter

Warm and sustained applause is due to the ACAE Committee for their clear, candid and coherent response to the recently launched Arts in Education Charter (Letters Jan 22).

The ACAE Committee grasp the need for the creativity of the arts in education and assert that “the place of the arts in our curriculum is acknowledged as central and not a quasi-optional extra”.

They also, crucially, highlight the pivotal role of teachers: the regular, daily tapestry of learning deserves to be embroidered with creativity.

Why be bound up in endless rote-learning, cataloguing, and the regurgitated templates of ‘received delivery’, fixed curricular formats and ‘testing’ schemata.

Holistic education is a valuable opportunity to embrace and foster the innate creativity of teacher and student alike, so both can flourish.

This transformation should be woven into undergraduate education, and not only in-service training, and should be undertaken as a ‘prequel’ to engagement, rather than as an after-thought or add-on.

Flexibility, improvisation, and idiosyncratic approaches must surely always be welcome in the midst of relentless ‘milestoning’, and percentile priming.

True, there are a lot of pressures and demands on teachers and schools to ‘perform’, but at whose behest, and by which measure?

Shouldn’t education be more for guiding, moulding and encouraging the wide-spectrum development of rounded, multi-talented young people across the full range of aptitudes.

The day-to-day weave of creative process, can hitch, harness and hone the ‘right-sided’ brain to assert its role within a rich, balanced mix of learning development.

The importance of creativity to education and learning is validated by neuro-scientific commentary and research, and is well worth its cerebral salt.

An authentic ‘troika-of-truths’ for education could be thus: creativity, creativity, and creativity.

Jim Cosgrove

Lismore

Co Waterford