Holistic Education
Taken from 'It's A Boy! Understanding Your Son's Development from Birth to Age 18'- Michael Thompson, Ph.D and Teresa H. Barker (2008)
A middle school principal once said to me: "The arts save boys' lives." That thought kept echoing in my mind, and I went back to talk to him about it. "What do you mean 'saves boys' lives'?" I asked.
"Well, it allows them to express themselves and get outside themselves," he said.
"Get outside themselves?" I asked. Yes, he said and went on to explain that it is through the arts---music, drawing, clay and woodworking---that a boy can proclaim his true self. He described watching a boy build an abstract sculpture using pieces of wood. This young man was intensely focused on the placement of the pieces of wood in relation to one another, and he labored at it till he got it just right. When it was finished he was clearly pleased with the way it looked.
What else in a boy's life allows him to create something that produces that feeling of satisfaction? This is mine. I made it. It represents me. Very few things in school do. And it's a different feeling from succeeding in athletics. It is an act of creativity. Furthermore, most art has the advantage of involving movement. A middle school orchestra conductor told me that a mother had written to him, "My sixth-grade son loves two things: playing ice hockey and playing violin." I was surprised and wasn't sure I saw the connection, and asked him to explain. He said that both in hockey and in playing the violin you're expressing yourself while moving. That makes sense.
If we see in the arts a chance for boys to move and create and take risks and reach a satisfying conclusion then we no longer think of the arts as something antithetical to sports or as frills in the world of school. We see the arts as a unique opportunity for boys to express their feelings, their hopes, and their fears in nonverbal ways.
In more than thirty years of being in schools, I have seen a lot of art---a lot of pictures drawn by children and a lot of student performances on stage. I can say with confidence that experience in the arts allows a boy to feel a sense of satisfaction that he cannot experience in any other realm of his life. And it allows him insight into himself that he cannot obtain in any other way.
I remember one high school boy who wrote about his experience in singing chorus, feeling his voice joining with the voices of others in a community of sound. His description of it was beautiful. But just as important, the self-knowledge that he had gained from singing---the knowledge about his need for interdependence, his place in community, and his realization of his best self in cooperation with other people---was powerful indeed.
One last thought about the arts. An art teacher whose practice it had been to ban boys from "drawing anything violent" in her class heard me speak about freeing boys to draw what they wanted to draw and write what they wanted to write, even if it wasn't to the taste of the teachers. This felt like a risk to her, and she took my advice with deep misgivings. For several months the boys kept checking with her, asking, "Are you sure we can draw whatever we want? Really?" She had to persuade them that she meant what she said. After a year of allowing the boys to express themselves without prohibitions in place, she wrote to me saying that she realized that much of the art she had been getting for years was formulaic and compliant, flowers and houses and such, drawn for the teacher's benefit. This new art was different. Some of it pushed the boundaries of good taste. Some of it scared her. But when she allowed boys to express what was inside them, the drawings she got were deeper, richer, and more powerful than she had ever seen in her career.
There is art inside every boy. Our job is to provide them the opportunity to discover it and the vehicle through which they can express it.