Fine Arts and Athletics Should Only Be Privately Funded?

The other day when we arrived in band our band director sat on his chair and began to read us an article from our school paper. It was an editorial written by one of the juniors at our school. His idea was that the fine arts and the athletics should only be funded by outside sources. He doesn’t believe the school should fund them at all because “they don’t help prepare you for the future.” The author believed that the school should be spending more money on core class books and updates than the fine arts and athletics.
I personally am very active in both fine arts and athletics. Therefore, it hit me hard, and this is a very opinionated post. I have been able to connect to people that I never thought I would even meet if it weren’t for the arts and athletics. The athletics has helped me get confidence in myself and learn how to work with and trust other people. It has helped me stay in shape and battle some health issues. It is also very fun and stimulating. It teaches you team work and how to think strategically about certain things. In math, a core class, everyone always asks, “Why do we need to know this? When will we ever use it?” The teacher always says, it’s not the actual information that you will need in the future; it’s the way of thinking about it and problem solving. This way of thinking is also brought into sports. You learn to work with other people, which is very helpful in the future, you learn self-control and self-awareness, which is helpful both in the work place and in social situations, and you also learn how to think of things strategically and be aware of everything around you. You learn things that you really can’t learn in a class room or anywhere else. Athletics are just as important to be a part of as any core class that we have. It helps us grow and develop in ways the class room can’t. Therefore, it is still teaching us and teaching us very important skills and should be funded by the school so we can get the best out of them and learn all we can from them.
The fine arts make you think differently than anything you do throughout your day. It gives you the ability to be creative and look at the world in a different way. I know that since I have started being very involved in the fine arts community I have learned to look at everyone and everything differently. I have learned to problem solve in ways I would never think of otherwise. In band we use multiple parts of our brain just to play our instrument and read music at the same time. It takes fundamentals from every core class and puts them together. We use math for counting and notes, we use history to learn about what we play, and we use English to read. The fine arts really pull everything together into one class and teach us things nothing else can. If we don’t get funding from the school we wouldn’t be able to learn as much and reach our full potential
The fine arts and athletics teach us things we can’t learn anywhere else. They should continue to be funded by the school so we can learn all we can from both of them and reach our full potential.