Think about it: the arts are all about how we perceive the world through the senses, and sort into order and harmony the welter of stimuli from outside us and within us, to create meaningful reality.

We make sense through our senses:

• Through the eyes—the visual arts—the child constructs shape into order and spatial understanding, light and darkness, chromatic harmony and dissonance, symmetry, perspective and distance.
• Through touch—the plastic arts—the child understands and learns to manage texture and temperature, hardness and resilience, liquid and solid.
• Through the ears—music—the child hears and discriminates sounds, harmonies and dissonances, rhythms and sequences, tones and timbres.
• Through the body—dance and movement—the child discovers his or her kinaesthetic power, what the body can do in space, contrasts of stillness, slowness and speed.
• Through the body, too, and through language and the voice—theatre and drama—the child learns about how we communicate, how every movement and gesture gives signals, how every sound we utter has signals that relate to that movement, and how the words we choose and the way we articulate them provide us with our richest communication tool, live conversation.
• All this sense-making would not be complete unless we could place it in time and space, and find cause and effect—storytelling—shaping with others the social narratives of our lives.

The job of the primary teacher is thus to help the children make sense and meaning, and to learn to manage their personal and social reality.

In earlier education systems, this reconstruction of sensual data into an ordered, balanced, and harmonious understanding of the self (a child’s personal identity and place in the world); and of the demands, rights, and responsibilities of operating as a complex social being (social skills) were taught primarily through the arts (painting, storytelling, dance theatre) and through play.

In play, the child instinctively engages artistically to discover the science and the mystery of living. This flows naturally into life skills essential in contemporary society. Far from taking valuable time from the direct inculcation of ‘basic skills’, a weight of research affirms that music- and visual-arts-rich schooling actually increase mathematical capability and drama-rich schooling increases the forgotten basic, oracy, and also enhances literacy.

All this should make it quite mystifying why our ‘modern’ schooling system is as it is.
However, of course, it is that way because of the structures and assumptions that we all pass on from our own schooling. Before they go to school, children have already learned a lot, from their entirely amateur family and friends, who are usually unaided by any ‘professional’ educators.

Let’s consider how young children learn: they learn through the senses and with their brains, bodies, and emotions all working together. They learn by exploring and testing, trial and error, by taking risks—learning by getting it wrong first, so they can get it right next time. They learn imaginatively through creative leaps and humour, playing with juxtaposition. They learn from everybody around, including peers and playmates, television, the people they meet, their surroundings; through copying and social interaction, discovering the external world together; through the worlds of social relationships and personal feeling and expression. They scaffold new learning on what they already know. Above all, they learn through play and the artistry of play—musical, linguistic, visual and design, dance, and dramatic play.

At around five years of age we take them and pitch them for about half their waking life into a new game called school. Here, we leave play outside in the playground; a schoolroom is a place for something else, so we discourage ‘playing around’. We focus on cognition and ban the emotions (‘no tears’, ‘stop laughing’). We restrict or ban movement and the body. We severely restrict language and social interaction, and especially their endless questions (‘stop talking and listen to me’). We replace their normal surroundings with a single room with specialised equipment and closed doors called ‘the classroom’, and their playmates, television, and the people round them with a small number of grown-up strangers called ‘the teacher’.

Here, exploring and playing with knowledge is replaced by something called the curriculum. This is special knowledge that the teachers have, so the questions are now asked by the teacher, and they are not real questions because the teacher already knows the answers—the right answers. Trial-and-error is replaced with those right answers. The questions and the excitement of risk and failure without penalty are replaced with penalties for failure and we learn not to take imaginative or intellectual risks, and especially not to make jokes. Curriculum knowledge is delivered as ‘new’ not scaffolded.

Among the other things we traditionally leave behind at the classroom door are: play and art. Play is seen as the province of the playground, or the fill-in time between matters of more importance. Art, somewhat more uneasily, is so often relegated to the margins and the co-curriculum.

The connections between play and art, and between both of them and learning, are fundamental. Both play and art are serious business—the business of the human imagination, defining reality through new possible realities, models of human experience, new angles and perspectives, creating order from chaos and also disturbing order to imagine new orders, finding harmonies and previously unheard melodies.

By the time they come to school, children are already very good at play, and developing highly sophisticated artistic skills. In the first half of the twentieth century the visual artists were the first to perceive the sophisticated aesthetic of very young children’s play—their management of form and space combined with the boldness and freedom of discovery—and very grownup artists like Picasso, Klee, and Miro were among the host of elite artists humble enough to acknowledge the debt they owed to the art of ordinary children and learn from it for their own art.

Over a hundred years ago in education, John Dewey was urging exactly the same thing. From him there is a line of theorists and educators demonstrating and proving that children’s art and learning are inextricably linked.
 
Of course, none of these pairs of concepts are binary opposites, as they look on this two-dimensional diagram, but just at the opposite ends of an interplaying continuum, where players and artists find their own places, moving along the continuum between the more playful forms of art and the more artful forms of play. Hard-core art is at the right side of the diagram, and hard-core play is at the left. Both ends of the dimensions are open, as there is an element of play and negotiability in nearly all artworks, just as there is a strong component of art in nearly all play.