Schools today struggle to help students who daily deal with serious mental health issues that include anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, and suicide. Christian schools, too, face challenges. They aren’t exempt, and they may be better equipped to address mental health issues than other schools, since they stand on God’s truth and are strengthened by the Spirit. Concerned teachers are doing a good deal of prevention and intervention, giving students the gospel along with child psychology best-practices, and many are seeing positive results. But is an additional, helpful resource—creative expression in art class—being overlooked?
Christian educators understand that learning is essential for personal well-being, building up neighborhoods and communities, and growing local churches. Young people will go on to impact the world in some way. Every one of them has an opportunity to make their impact a positive one. Learning is the power they’ll wield, if they take possession of it—if teachers point them to it. Art is also powerful and can have a commanding role in education. It teaches students about themselves and others, it enriches their lives, and it effects change for society. Our culture is increasingly creative and increasingly run by creative people. The likes of Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos lead the way; it’s for art teachers to inspire those next in line.
Our culture is increasingly creative and increasingly run by creative people.
But art teachers can also help students who feel defeated. Poor mental health takes power away from children and adolescents; creative expression can begin to give it back.
God, Beauty, and Creative Expression
Art is all about beauty. Art is the impression and expression of beauty and meaning in symbolic shape or form. When artists go about making art, they are attempting to connect with an audience, to communicate personal feelings of longing or desire. Some attempts are satisfyingly successful; others fall short, leading to frustration. This is the problem of the artist: how to respond to beauty, what to do with longing, how to deal with desire. Creative expression is the artist’s proposed solution; it’s how the problem gets solved—or sometimes doesn’t.
Not all students are artists, of course, but we all share this same problem. Everyone longs for beauty; we all desire God. Ecclesiastes 3:11 reminds us that God has “set eternity in the human heart.” People young and old must respond to it; we will express ourselves. The goal is to make that expression healthy, to make it creative.
Expression is not just a release. It’s more than simply getting things out in order to move on from them. Rather, it’s a process of coming to a right understanding of ourselves. Art helps by acting as a mirror. Children and adolescents paint themselves into their creations and then respond to the reflection. Their projections are dealt with objectively, if from a short distance. Students can identify with what they see in the mirror, or they can change it, making it more positive, more beautiful.
Difficult Emotions
Mental health issues, unfortunately, present challenges for children and adolescents. Biology, psychology, and environmental conditions all contribute to anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, and suicide. Some students are born with chemical imbalances, for example. Others have experienced the death of a parent or their parents’ divorce. Many feel pressure to perform at high levels in sports or academics. Sexual abuse may be a factor. The list is long; the pain is often deep. Most don’t know what to do with their grief.
The way we’ve educated students hasn’t always helped either.
The way we’ve educated students hasn’t always helped either. Our systems, as we’ve designed them, are more likely to engage the intellect than to address emotions. Thoughts are regularly shared in school, but feelings are discouraged, considered to be a private affair unfit for public consumption. Children and adolescents learn early on to compartmentalize head and heart, and in doing so they risk losing the integration that leads to wholeness. Humans must know what we feel and feel what we know. We especially need to understand our most difficult emotions. Art class is the place where students learn “sense-itivity,” where special senses are trained.
Seeing Things Rightly
Art teaches students to see—to see things with their eyes but also with their imaginations. This is not the stuff of fantasy or illusion but of intuition. Artists perceive. In most school subjects, children and adolescents only learn to look, but in art class they’re taught to see inside.
Perceptivity is a skill; it’s a gaining of greater awareness. As children grow into adolescents, they must develop the ability to see beyond the way things are to the way things should be. Healthy, creative individuals are open to all kinds of possibilities and are aware of alternate realities. Students need to learn that they can choose their course and even change course.
Early on, children learn right and wrong, good and bad according to culture’s conventions, and their authorities make sure these are accepted without qualification. “This is just the way it is,” they say. Convergent thinking like this is reinforced in some school subjects where appropriate, but it can even show up in beginner art classes. For example, students want to draw things “correctly,” so they come up with a symbol (schema) that depicts a car, one for a house, and another for a tree. These are repeated over and over until the student begins to believe that the drawing represents reality. Many students will remain at this stage indefinitely (most adults only draw at an eleven- or twelve-year-old level), but some do advance to a more naturalistic way of drawing. Early adolescents learn a little perspective and experiment with light and dark, but the most perceptive students will eventually use abstraction to express themselves. Abstraction is seeing greater detail, picking out parts from the whole and considering them independently. It’s divergent thinking.
Adolescents who learn abstraction may begin to see their situations as more open ended. They don’t have to accept things as they are but can explore other options. It’s naive, of course, to think that a perceptive student could instantly, willfully change his or her situation—those unfortunate circumstances that may have contributed to anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, or suicidal thoughts. Mental health issues are complex, we know, and healing is long and difficult. Creative expression in art class is no cure-all—it won’t provide every opportunity students need—but seeing things rightly (as creative, full of possibility, and open ended) can begin to build a student’s confidence.
Building Student Confidence
As children grow, especially children with challenges, they can lose confidence. Ordinary development feels anything but natural. The onset of puberty often causes great confusion. Adolescents worry. Many gain increased self-awareness, for example, and regularly anticipate criticism from others. Some doubt their abilities; others are dissatisfied with their appearance.
Art is a great equalizer. Art class is accepting—even the room feels inviting. Art teachers create an environment where students are free to be themselves, to be different without judgment or reprisal. Children and adolescents feel cared for when adults encourage their creative expressions. And, when other students approve of their art products, they feel empowered. They become more self-assured. Students learn resilience in facing their fears—perseverance in solving the problem of the artist.
Creative expression in art class helps students to see themselves—even their difficult emotions—and it can offer them alternatives. Choosing beauty builds confidence. It’s not the antidote to mental health issues. It’s not more important than medicine or therapy. It won’t eliminate anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, or suicide—only God can do that. But it’s also not uncommon to hear a despairing student later claim, “Art saved my life!”
Adam Shea Lancaster (DEdMin, MDiv) is a professional artist, Christian minister, and art educator living outside Dallas, Texas. He can be contacted at adamlancasterart.com.
