The study of Performing, Visual, and Literary Arts provides a medium for communication and expression of ideas and feelings and helps to establish values and goals. Art, in its many forms, has always played a major role in society, providing a mirror to the thinking and feeling of the times.
Academically, we know that the study of Performing, Visual and Literary Arts increases reading and math skills; it develops creative thinking; it helps students gain motivation for achievement; and it encourages cognitive engagement. At the institutional level, it contributes to improving the instructional practices of school, the professional culture, and the school climate.
The Holy Spirit Preparatory School Performing, Visual, and Literary Arts program provides a unique identity for our school and involves the entire community in ways that cannot be achieved through the pursuit of other academic endeavors.
As a community, throughout our Preschool, Lower School, and Upper School Arts programs, we strive to:
- Expose our students to the study of high quality art, music, and literature, both sacred and secular. We help our students learn to understand the artistic concepts of their chosen medium and how they are used to communicate about life and the beliefs, hopes, and dreams of a society.
- Provide outlets for student creativity and expression by giving every student, regardless of his or her ability, the opportunity to perform, create, and see the beauty in their creative pursuits and the pursuits of others.
The artist has a special relationship to beauty. In a very true sense it can be said that beauty is the vocation bestowed on him by the Creator in the gift of “artistic talent”. And, certainly, this too is a talent, which ought to be made to bear fruit, in keeping with the sense of the Gospel parable of the talents. Here we touch on an essential point. Those who perceive in themselves this kind of divine spark which is the artistic vocation—as poet, writer, sculptor, architect, musician, actor and so on—feel at the same time the obligation not to waste this talent but to develop it, in order to put it at the service of their neighbor and of humanity as a whole.
-"Letter to Artists," John Paul II, 1999
Educators know that the goals of the arts—high standards and personal expectations, exacting discipline and creative risk—are the elements needed for success in learning and in life.
-The Dana Foundation