Here's another excellent advocacy piece on for Art Education, this time from actor Stephen Weber, who writes:

Officially marginalized in our schools and practically vestigial in the anatomy of our systems of education and business, art---its creation and enjoyment---is in need of rediscovery and reapplication within those systems. Without art as a functioning, practical and living concept, the ideas upon which our society has of late built itself are brittle and disposable and have the briefest of shelf-lives.

Art is the connective tissue between our brains, bodies and souls, giving character to blandness, hope to hollowness. Without art the overseers of the failed approach toward sustaining a national economy or a healthy, thriving workforce are themselves slaves to souless corporate conceptualizing which in theory is meant to supply humanity with the means to attain happiness but which in reality prevents that from ever happening.