Welcome to Rolesville High School's Visual Arts Homepage. At Rolesville, we are interested in developing the entire artist. Courses are designed to develop the skills of the artist and to push them intellectually; guiding them to develop and nurture their creativity and problem solving abilities. RHS Visual Arts Program begins with the foundation and exploration of art and builds into more complex and more open-ended problems leading to more independence and personal voice.  

Please explore our course offerings from the Visual Arts Drop down menu.

The Benefits of Art Education

In the 21st century world, creative, analytical people are needed to succeed in the workforce. Regardless of occupation, art provides students with these skills. From  learning skills and history to philosophizing why decisions were made, then applying this information to their own work and then to critiquing and breaking down art both made by themselves and others, students learn skills irreplaceable to the work force. Art education creates confident, creative decisive diverse cultural people ready to achieve and prosper in our modern society.

1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships.

Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it

is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution

and that questions can have more than one answer.

3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives.

One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.

4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving

purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. 

Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. 

The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects.

The arts traffic in subtleties.

7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material.

All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said.

When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.

9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source 

and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young

what adults believe is important.

SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications. NAEA grants reprint permission for this excerpt from Ten Lessons with proper acknowledgment of its source and NAEA.