my cdi essay

5. Should an introduction to art, music, and drama be a part of every college student's education? Explain why or why not.

An introduction to art, music, and drama need to remain a requirement for every college student’s education. The arts are the component of a well-rounded education that helps to develop critical thinking, intelligent analysis, and cognitive skills. In school, your basic education will teach you how to read; the artistic component of your education will help you to comprehend what you read. These students will grow to become our next generation of not just writers, musicians, and visual artists, but our next architects, inventors, computer web designers, and technicians because the arts helped develop their creative and independent thinking as well as logistical and mathematical skills. With this ability of comprehension, the Arts will help a student excel in school and therefore develop the competencies needed to succeed in whatever path they choose in life.

A student who understands the curriculum will exceed academically. One can help a student to understand the curriculum by using the arts to supplement traditional academic lectures. Take for example a study of the American Civil Rights Movement. It is one thing to read the history textbook memorizing names and dates. But think of how much more this student would understand and truly come to comprehend and empathize when s/he reads the struggles of being young and Black in Richard Wrights Black Boy or watch the racial injustice in director Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird. A student will become more invested in the curriculum and course work when s/he understands what they’re studying. The student will not just memorize that 1965 is the year of the Voting Rights Act; this student will remember the poetry, literature, film, and arts, that showed s/he what America was like at the time the Voting Rights Act was enacted.

Knowledge of the arts opens up a student’s creativity. It makes him/her think outside of the box. All great discoveries and inventions started with “what if” or “what will happen,” and these ideas and questions rooted in science come from minds with some arts sensibility. Had Christopher Columbus not questioned the widely accepted belief that the world was flat, perhaps Europe wouldn’t have known what we know now as America even existed.

Every field, be it professional, corporate, medical, or technical, use both art and science and invaluable results come from this collaboration. Leonardo Da Vinci, for example: this artist is famous for his painterly skills on the Mona Lisa, but Da Vinci was also an inventor and scientist. He had a fascination with the human body evident in his many drawings of perfectly proportioned human bodies. He studied cadavers in the name of art to help him develop in figurative painting and as a result, some of our early knowledge of human anatomy can be attributed to his artwork. Da Vinci’s original and creative mind also lent itself to many inventions. He had a fascination with flight and tried many times to invent a flying machine. He was successful in inventing a hang glider that, when tested years after his death, did work. This is proof that art is beneficial everywhere. Every mind flourishes with exposure to the arts and can help students develop into successful adults.

Having a college education infused with artistic elements benefit the student in so many ways. It’s an artistic sensibility that helps a student to understand every other school subject and therefore helps him or her to excel in every class. A student who understand the curriculum is a student that is going to develop in terms of creative thinking, problem solving, independent thinking, decision making and communications skills, leadership skills; the life skills necessary to become a successful adult.