What Can Art Teach Children Beyond Art Skills?
Updated: 12 hours ago
Growing up in China, I came across many different ideas about why children should learn art. Some common ones went something like this:
“Most artists spend their lives in poverty and only become famous after they die. Some even go mad and cut off their ears. Still, art can be useful—it might help a child get into a better university if their academic results aren't quite good enough.”
“I've never really thought much about art, but everyone else’s kids are learning it. Mine can't be left behind.”
“My child is addicted to the iPad. An art class has to be better than sitting around watching cartoons or playing video games.”
“It's a useful skill. You never know—they might need it for work one day.”
“It's nice for a child to have a cultured hobby—music, calligraphy, painting, that sort of thing.”
“My kid seems talented. Maybe they'll become the next Chen Danqing!”
“Creativity is important. Art is supposed to help with creativity, so why not give it a try?”
These particular ideas may be less common in Australia, but the question is much the same: what is art actually useful for? If a child isn’t going to become an artist, it can be hard to see why art should matter, especially when schoolwork becomes more demanding. I see this in my own classes. Most enquiries I get are for younger children. Once children start preparing for OC or selective school exams, many stop art classes to make more time for English, maths and tutoring.
The Visible and Hidden Benefits of Art
Some benefits of learning art are easy to see. Others are much harder to recognise.
Visible Benefits
These are the things parents can easily see, measure or point to:
- Making artwork good enough to display, share on social media or enter into competitions.
- Being able to make something for a school display, exhibition or event.
- Building a portfolio that may help with school or university admission.
- Having an artistic skill that is impressive in itself.
Hidden Benefits
These are harder to see and even harder to measure. Perhaps artists themselves explain them best.
Art as another language
I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say in any other way — things that I had no words for. —Georgia O'Keeffe
Learning to notice beauty
In short, Beauty is everywhere. It is not she that is lacking to our eye, but our eyes which fail to perceive her. Beauty is character and expression. —Auguste Rodin
Creativity:
IIn the past, art couldn’t put food on the table; in the future, children who don’t learn art won't be able to put food on the table.” —Jack Ma
Seeing the world differently
Art is nothing but the expression of our dream; the more we surrender to it the closer we get to the inner truth of things, our dream-life, the true life that scorns questions and does not see them. —Franz Marc
Self expression.
If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing. —Marc Chagall
Let's focus on what I think is one of the most important, and often overlooked, parts of art: self-expression.
As Georgia O'Keeffe described it, art can say things that we cannot put into words. Expressing ourselves is something we naturally do, but it is also something we learn to do. When we speak, we don't speak to prove that we can speak. So why should making art be mainly about proving that we can draw or paint well?
Chagall's comment about creating "from the heart" points to something similar. Some of the most interesting art comes when people are absorbed in what they want to express and stop worrying so much about whether they are doing it correctly.
Children can work this way very naturally. They exaggerate things, leave things out, change colours, distort proportions and organise a picture according to what matters to them. The result may not be realistic or technically polished, but it can be full of life.
This is easier to see in an actual drawing.
A Tale of Two Drawings
Six-year-old Qiyuan made the drawing below in one of my online art classes. If you tend to judge a drawing by how realistic it looks, you might ask: “Why are the swimmers’ arms longer than their legs? Why do they only have three fingers? And why are the fish bigger than the people?”
Let's compare that drawing with the kind of artwork you often see in children's art classes. Many parents might prefer the one below: it has neat outlines, bold colours, the fish actually look like fish, and the water is blue.
Yes, all of those things are true. But take another look and the picture feels strangely lifeless. The fish look like plastic, the plants are stiff, and there is little sense of the child behind it. It feels like a collection of shapes and colours put together correctly.
Now look again at Qiyuan's drawing. There is joy, imagination and energy in it. The lines are loose and confident, as though the whole drawing came out in one burst. There is a lot going on—people swimming, fish everywhere, different shapes and movements—but somehow it doesn’t feel cluttered. Even that unusually long fish at the bottom helps hold the picture together.
This is what I love about children's art.
Chinese painter and essayist Feng Zikai once wrote about children's drawings in a similar way:
"Look carefully at these scribbles, and you'll see a genuine creative instinct. Every stroke flows straight from their small but passionate hearts; each drawing is a little tribute to their heartfelt impressions."
Some might argue, “Shouldn't the teacher at least teach them the correct number of the fingers?”
Take a look at this Picasso painting and count the fingers on the woman's hands.
Picasso certainly knew that people have five fingers. Six-year-old Qiyuan knows that too. But when making art, getting everything anatomically correct isn’t always the point. A child may exaggerate, simplify or change things because that is how they want to show them. Those “mistakes” can actually be part of what gives the drawing its character.
Now look at the Paul Klee painting below. Can you see something of the same spirit in Qiyuan's drawing?
“The purpose of art is to wash the dust of daily life off our souls.” —Pablo Picasso
Some parents may ask, "Even if art is another language, can't children just talk about how they feel? And if my child isn't going to become an artist, why does it matter?"
But we don't experience everything in words. Sometimes we don’t know exactly what we feel, or we don't want to explain it. Drawing, painting, making music and writing can give us other ways to express and work through an experience.
This matters whether someone becomes an artist or not. Children already have plenty of activities where there is something to achieve—a better mark, a higher level, a certificate, a competition. Art can have a different place in their lives. It can be something they return to simply because they enjoy making, looking, noticing and expressing.
And that can stay with them long after childhood. Whatever work they eventually do, art can remain part of a life that is bigger than work: something they enjoy, something that absorbs them, and sometimes a way of making sense of what they are going through.
Whenever I run into a problem, I face it with the axe of art. —Yayoi Kusama
Self-expression gives children another way to experience the world and communicate what they feel. A beautiful finished artwork may seem like a more obvious result of learning art because we can see it, display it and be proud of it. The ability to express something through art is much harder to see. But over a lifetime, it may be one of the most valuable things children take from art, whether they become artists or not.
That is one of the hidden benefits of art, and perhaps one of the easiest to overlook.
Art may never become a child’s career, and that doesn’t make the time spent learning it any less worthwhile. Years later, they may not remember how to draw a perfect face or mix a particular colour, but they may still turn to art when they have something to express, when they want to make sense of an experience, or simply because making something brings them pleasure. Perhaps that is enough reason to learn art.
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