Nowadays it is becoming increasingly clear that music, and arts in general, play an important role in the society we live in. However, in public schools, arts don’t always get the relevance that they deserve. In a society like ours, that is increasingly getting more technified, it is easier to consign art to entertainment and consumption, underestimating the real value and power that it has. The first goal of art and culture in a society is, and has always been, to create beauty, to generate shared imaginaries, and to build a collective identity. As Cibran Sierra says in his article El coronavirus, a escena “our identity feeds on arts, and we can not exist without them, because they are part of our human condition”.
It is important to note that public schools have the duty to transmit knowledge, to generate critical citizens who are capable of creating new emancipatory and sustainable social models, who can also competently read and write in an mature way, and who understand the social and economic system we live in. But we shouldn’t forget that the transmission of moral values, the development of emotional intelligence, and the relevance of arts as a tool for communication and expression are also issues that fall within the responsibility of the public education.
As Torregosa says : “Emotions and human feelings are social constructions that come from the result of social interactions” (1984). Taking this into account, it is very important to learn how to express these feelings through a strong system of values. In this sense, arts are fundamental, and are also a very powerful and emancipatory tool to work with, since they help us to connect with our emotions and allow us to communicate them, increasing our imaginative power and developing our sensibility in an individual and in a collective way.
If we think about children, this becomes even more clear. They way to express themselves has been adversely affected by the new Covid-19 measures. The lockdown and the social distancing have affected all of us, but children don’t have the same ability to think and communicate as the adults have, and because of it, it is now more necessary than ever that we help them by giving them all the possible tools to express and articulate their feelings, to empathise with their fellow students and friends, and to develop their emotional intelligence.
This project came up from this need. With the aim to draw art in different ways to the children as a tool to connect them with their feelings and to show them that there is a way to articulate these feelings in a fair, tolerant, free, supportive and equalitarian path way in a moment when Covid-19 measures have hampered their usual ways of communication. And, at the same time, this project seeks to bring out the relevance of music and arts in our society.