Teaching art: an aesthetic dog's breakfast

Last year Sydney was visited by one of the leading figures in the field of creativity and education, Sir Ken Robinson. Kerry O’Brien interviewed him over two nights but not much was written in mainstream print media thus allowing the general public to abrogate any responsibility in knowing or understanding creativity and education. Robinson states:

… every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Every one. Doesn't matter where you go. You'd think it would be otherwise, but it isn't. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on Earth. And in pretty much every system too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. Picasso once said this: he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately: that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it.

He continues:

There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not?

The same can be said of the visual arts, drama and music. There just isn’t any system of education that puts the arts, which provide important and different ways of thinking, at the top of a hierarchy of subjects in primary and secondary schools.

Why not?

One consequence of this indifference and discrimination to aesthetic and visual arts education is that our visual quality of life and particularly our urban landscape becomes an aesthetic dog’s breakfast.