What is happening?

Where is it happening? 
Arts education in schools varies enormously and is valued differently in many parts of 
the world. Reverberations of the British experience can be felt in the United States, 
where the pressures of tight budgets, over-crowded curricula and a "locked embrace" 
with standardised testing are blamed for a generally weakened focus on the 
arts. However, the arts experience varies from school to school: some struggling schools 
have implemented programs such as the Turnaround Arts Initiative, with reported 
success. While arts education is similarly "STEM-focused" elsewhere, countries like 
South Africa have seized on "arts integration" - where the arts are infused across all 
subject areas to inspire meaningful learning - as a global trend worth pursuing. 
Elsewhere in the world, arts education is taken very seriously. In Finland, it is 
considered vital to creativity: art disciplines including visual arts, crafts, music, art and 
dance are widely taught and arts integration occurs across the curriculum. In China, too, 
arts education is very important: one major survey found that 42 per cent of Chinese 
parents believed a creative approach to problem solving was the most important skill in 
driving innovation; compared to 17 per cent of American parents. 
Is arts education valued in Australia? 
Dance, drama, media arts, music and visual arts form the Arts program in the Australian 
Curriculum, with "creative and critical thinking" integrated across all subject areas. The 
2014 review of the Australian Curriculum, commissioned by the federal government, 
described the arts as a "crucial part" of school education that should not be viewed as an 
"add-on component". However, some have expressed dismay at the recommendations 
made, including a refocusing on literacy and numeracy in early primary school, less 
emphasis on creative and critical thinking across all subject areas, and for some arts 
subjects to be subsumed into others; such as "dance" into "health and physical 
education" and "drama" into "English". 

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Many educators join their international counterparts in calling for arts and creativity to 
be taken as seriously as literacy and numeracy in schools. Professor Robyn Ewing from 
the University of Sydney says that the reviewers' recommendations display a lack of 
understanding of what the individual arts disciplines are about and that "creativity, 
problem solving and developing our imagination" are as important as literacy and 
numeracy "if we expect kids to solve the problems of the 21st century".