The attitude of our culture towards the arts is very peculiar. We view the arts as pastimes, frills, not as serious and essential subjects. And this is reflected in the way that the arts are presented in schools. In the early grades there is great permissiveness. Kindergarten students are given inviting materials and encouraged to do what they please. They sing loudly; they dance around the room as the spirit moves them; they act out. There is little in the way of adult modeling, instruction, art history or aesthetics, no training in perception. As the child progresses through primary school, the arts are gradually crowded out of the curriculum, and free expression is replaced by more mechanical exercises: map-making, the study of dramatic texts, ensemble playing in music.

By high school, the arts have become options—only one credit in the arts is required for graduation with an Ontario High School Diploma. And even for the student who has a special interest in, or aptitude for, the arts, the emphasis is narrowed to production. Dance often disappears altogether, drama is focused on the formal production of plays, visual arts are oriented towards the making of works, and music is centred on learning and playing pieces.

As Melvin Tumin, a professor of sociology at Princeton, put it, "Early in a student's school career the usual school shuts down on his or her artistic and creative dimensions of intelligence as it begins relentlessly to pursue the development of his or her skills in the so-called hard subjects... The creative and imaginative dimensions of mind and of heart of many children are being destroyed in the educational process as presently constructed."

At the Dragon Academy, we conceive the arts as core subjects, like mathematics, the sciences, language. We do not believe that a person can have received the basics of a good education without developing the ability to perceive and understand the artistic experience along with verbal and mathematical skills.

For this reason, the arts form part of our mandatory curriculum. In each year, Dragon students take visual arts, music and dramatic arts, and find dance integrated into their physical education studies. These courses marry performance or production with the development of skills in looking at works of art, in understanding the artistic process, in grasping the historical, philosophical and cultural conditions of the arts.