The Future of Education: An Artistic Reform by Maddox

The Future of Education: An Artistic Reform by Maddox - September 2025 Scholarship Essay

Education in the US is an ever-changing and fast-moving department. Changes and reforms to education everywhere from district boards down to classroom procedures and rules are often and rapid. With the changes and implementations that go into education, there is always one singular goal for schools across the country, to educate individuals so that they may become our better future. I as a student, believe there is no better way to form an individual other than through artistic and creative means.

The words "art" and "creativity" are often thrown around as verbs to describe a leisure activity, a hobby rather than a thing to be taken seriously. But I believe art can be a way of teaching, art in the form of literature, of personal projects that require individual thinking outside of rubrics, even creative projects that include showing work with a physical form of evidence rather than tests or essays.

Studies have shown that teaching through artistic means has a concrete increase in critical thinking, strengthening memory, deeper understanding, and more involvement. Harvard Project Zero is a study founded to research and show what teaching in the arts can do for students. As a quick summary, through a multitude of projects they found that art- integrated studies lead to a 9 -11% increase in retention of content. They found that in some places there was a 40-60% increase in participation. Through artistic measures it was even found that there was a 25% increase in verbal reasoning. These numbers are inspiring to see that artistic and creative forms of teaching can have such an impact. These are only some studies done on this subject with highly successful results. While these numbers have great meaning, they are only just numbers, the truth of the matter comes from the personal realities of students.

The majority of my high school career has been studying for math tests, writing papers for English, and digging through online videos trying to gain a better grasp on what I was expected to learn. As my teachers wanted, I did learn. But what I saw happening is not what I would want from the effort and time I put into so much work. I was forgetting all of what I learned. I see a lot of classwork today aimed at teaching a student how to do something periodically, and this was truthful for the majority of what I learned. I cannot remember the formulas for geometry or the definitions of words like idioms or onomatopoeia. But what I do remember is the first project I ever did for high school biology, creating a 3-D cell.

My teacher at the time instructed the class to memorize a basic animal cell. She had taught us through lecture, but required us to make our own cell project through playdough, Styrofoam, or really anything else that obtained the ability to showcase a physical cell like pizza or cake. This project was not only genuinely fun, but it allowed me to retain the information about everything that composes a cell, even to this day. If it were not for that project, I could not remember the importance of ribosomes or the rough endoplasmic reticulum. I could not explain that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell responsible for creating ADP. I could not explain that phospholipids are what make up the plasma membrane of the cell. If I was not required to complete a 3-D model of the cell, the things I learned from biology would join the rest of the classes I took. It would ultimately become obsolete in time due to the fact that I no longer had a usage for it. I see often times that the normal way of teaching through lecture, study, memorization, and exams are ineffective and short term.

Due to my own personal experience, and the data I have seen, I hope that in the next ten years education will reform to an artistic and creative way of teaching. I hope to see that students are challenged on individual and genuine thinking rather than exams. I hope to see memorizing terms and definitions for exams lessened and replaced with a more student involved way of learning. In ten years, I hope to see that students enjoy the work they do, rather than stressing about deadlines or papers. This way of teaching will allow for students to become what the world needs, and will always need: leaders, critical thinkers, people passionate about what they do because they love it, creators, inventors, world changers. These can be the people of our future.