School with a difference — Using Art program to build life skills!
When was the last time you painted or drew a picture? For most people, chances are that it has been ages! What if you were told that art can actually help you develop a lot of essential life skills such as creative problem solving, which involves thinking out of the box to come up with brilliant solutions to real life problems that are otherwise difficult to solve. What if you were told that you could be 10 times, 20 times or maybe even 50 times more creative than you are right now, and be better at making decisions, only if you had taken an art class while growing up? Maybe that is why business leaders from Steve Jobs to Jack Ma want kids to study art. Here’s an insight to a school’s art program that might change your mind.
Vishwajyot High School has been, for the last 15 years, running a very unique art program right through kindergarten to high school. The program focuses on engaging and exposing children to different forms of art even before they learn to write. In preprimary, they are taught stories and they draw their own interpretations in their books. In the primary grades, they are exposed to wet-on-wet painting. In the middle school, they are introduced to handwork such as knitting, weaving, clay work, pottery and carving. High school students learn more advanced forms of painting and the use of colours. But they aren’t just doing it for fun; there is a very deep thought involved in everything they do.
Being a part of the Vishwajyot family, when I look back on my childhood, the most prominent thing that stands out is the art that I’ve created in my play time. I’ve done a lot of artwork and projects as a part of school curriculum, and I think they have really helped in my holistic development. I joined Vishwajyot as a fourth grader and stayed till I graduated after the tenth grade. I went on to pursue mechanical engineering, which extensively requires you to be creative, dexterous, and have a knack for problem solving. My art projects have helped me develop communication, imagination, spatial awareness and have taught me the value of hard work.
When children are young and just beginning to read and write, art and drawing provide a channel of communication for them to express their thoughts like no other. Also, expression through art is a very natural thing, for them it’s just play time.
Colors have a huge impact on children’s emotional development. It is in the early years that they begin to associate emotions with different colors. For example, shades of red and orange induce feelings of warmth and comfort. Shades of blue induce calmness and depth. Shades of green are associated with nature and tranquility. Exposure to painting allows kids to experience these effects that colors have on their malleable minds. It builds character in them, and is therefore a very important tool for building their persona in the early years of their life.
It was the joy of holding a brush in my hand and realizing that I can paint the world which made me feel empowered at that young age. Dipping the brush in water and noticing how the dry, hardened brush hair becomes soft, then plunging it into the color pallet and running it wild across the blank sheet of paper, realizing how soft and smooth each stroke feels — it was that feeling which made me forget everything else around and transported me into a totally different dimension.
At Vishwajyot, as children grow up and transition into middle school, they pursue individual handwork projects that may last for as long as 6 months. This inculcates some of the most important life skills, such as patience and the value of hard work. Completing a project in stitching, knitting or weaving delays the process of instant gratification and provides a sense of achievement to the child when the project finally gets completed. It also helps develop fine motor skills such as hand-eye coordination and hand dexterity.
On the other hand, when children work with clay and on the potter’s wheel, they get connected to what is essentially the core of every living being on this planet, the soil. When they work with clay, they begin to think in 3D — suddenly it’s no more just two dimensional drawings. It helps develop imagination and spatial awareness.
Pottery has taught me a very important lesson — our actions have repercussions. Even the smallest movement of fingers can result in deformation. If we don’t be cautious about how we handle the clay, we will end up breaking our pots.
Going forward, in a few decades’ time when robots and machines would be sufficient enough to do most other things that humans do today, skills such as number crunching and remembering data will be irrelevant. What will be relevant is our ability to express and communicate like no other species on this planet can. It is art that will set us apart as humans. Schools like Vishwajyot are among the very few that are really building it.
