As a department, we believe that art is so much more than a hobby or skill - it is an inherent part of what makes us human. In fact, when you look back in history to when we first came into our humanness, the occasion is marked with our ability to create.

 

To see a need for a tool, to design it, make it and refine it - to draw on stone walls, to record our stories, to communicate. From the very start we are defined as makers. If you continue through time you will find no great civilization that exists without art – it is a marker of culture, education, and innovation. It encourages abstract thought and is the stuff ideas come from.

 

We have come a long way from cave painting and stone tools and today it seems there is no limit to what we can create and accomplish. However, without creators, visionaries, makers and innovators, that trajectory from the cave to today doesn’t exist.

 

At West Aurora, we strive to create students who will go on to speak, to invent, to change, to challenge, to problem solve, to be difference makers, to move us into a socially just future, and most importantly, to help us to see the world around us with new eyes.

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That is what we do,

and that is why art education matters.