Arts have always been a part of schooling in some form – a drawing period here, a music assembly there. But for decades, these activities existed at the margins of formal education, treated as pleasant extras rather than serious learning tools. That perspective is now changing in a decisive way. Across curriculum frameworks and policy documents, arts education is being repositioned as a core driver of holistic development, one that sharpens thinking, builds cultural awareness, and makes learning in every subject more meaningful.
Table of Contents
- What the National Education Policy 2020 says about arts
- CBSE’s framework: arts as a co-scholastic area
- Art-integrated learning as a teaching tool
- NCERT’s developmental approach to arts across school stages
- Foundational stage: play, story, and integrated expression
- Upper primary stage: exploring materials and techniques
- Secondary stage: specialisation, aesthetics, and cultural heritage
- Why this matters: the case for arts across the curriculum
- Challenges in implementation
- The broader vision: arts as a way of knowing
What the National Education Policy 2020 says about arts
The National Education Policy 2020 marks a clear departure from treating arts as an afterthought. One of its central arguments is that there should be no hard separation between curricular, extracurricular, and co-curricular domains, or between arts, humanities, and sciences. This is not just a philosophical statement – it has direct implications for how schools are expected to organise learning.
Art-integration, as described in NEP 2020, is a cross-curricular pedagogical approach that uses various aspects and forms of art and culture as the basis for learning concepts across subjects. It is embedded in classroom transactions not only to create joyful classrooms, but also to impart the Indian ethos through the integration of Indian art and culture at every level of schooling. In other words, arts are not simply taught as a standalone subject – they become the vehicle through which other subjects are taught and understood.
The policy also emphasises that this approach is fundamentally about experiential learning. From the foundational years, the curriculum is designed around play-based and activity-oriented methods, reducing content load and allowing space for exploration, curiosity, and holistic cognitive development. Arts – whether drawing, music, theatre, or dance – are natural tools for this kind of active engagement.
At the secondary level, NEP 2020 gives learners greater agency. Students are offered increased flexibility and choice of subjects, including subjects in physical education, the arts and crafts, and vocational skills, so that they can design their own paths of study and life plans. This signals that arts are no longer a compulsory but peripheral activity – they can be a genuine academic choice for older learners.
CBSE’s framework: arts as a co-scholastic area
The Central Board of Secondary Education has operationalised arts education through a structured co-scholastic framework. According to the CBSE Secondary School Curriculum, the curriculum is built around seven major learning areas. Scholastic areas include Languages, Social Sciences, Mathematics, and Science. Co-scholastic areas include Health and Physical Education – and Art Education.
Art Education at the secondary level entails instruction in various art forms, both visual and performing, with the aim of helping children develop an interest in the arts and encouraging them to enthusiastically participate in related activities. This promotes abilities such as imagination, creativity, valuing arts, and an appreciation of cultural heritage.
This placement in the co-scholastic domain is significant. It means that arts are formally assessed, graded, and recorded as part of a learner’s school profile – not merely noted for participation. Co-scholastic assessment is done term-wise on a grading scale where the criteria include regularity, sincere participation, output, and teamwork, covering Art Education (Visual and Performing Art) alongside Work Education and Health and Physical Education.
Art-integrated learning as a teaching tool
Beyond the co-scholastic category, CBSE has gone further by mandating art-integrated learning (AIL) across academic subjects. CBSE art-integrated activities are compulsory from 2020-21 in each subject for Classes 9 and 10, and are considered for internal assessment. Students of Classes 1 to 8 are required to undertake at least one art-integrated project each academic year, which can be considered for internal assessment in the subjects concerned.
The intent here is not to develop art skill per se. CBSE clarified in its circular that art-integrated learning was being introduced as a teaching tool – an approach to use art to both teach and help students comprehend other subjects more effectively. A student learning about the water cycle in science might express it through a visual collage. A lesson on historical migration could become a short piece of classroom theatre. The art form serves the academic concept, while simultaneously developing creative thinking.
In art-integrated learning activities, teachers and students may integrate visual and performing arts. Since skill in making art is not the criterion for evaluation, children can explore and produce very creative expressions that enable achievement of learning outcomes. This removes the anxiety of artistic perfection and refocuses attention on conceptual understanding.
NCERT’s developmental approach to arts across school stages
If CBSE provides the assessment structure, it is NCERT that gives arts education its pedagogical depth. NCERT’s approach is grounded in developmental appropriateness – matching the type and complexity of arts engagement to where the child is in their cognitive and emotional growth.
The 5+3+3+4 framework introduced under NEP 2020 divides school education into four stages: Foundational (covering pre-primary through Grade 2), Preparatory (Grades 3-5), Middle (Grades 6-8), and Secondary (Grades 9-12), with each stage aligned to a child’s cognitive and developmental milestones. Arts education is designed differently at each of these stages.
Foundational stage: play, story, and integrated expression
At the pre-primary and early primary levels, arts are not taught as a separate discipline – they are woven into everything. For the Foundational Stage, the curriculum is built around play-based learning content including stories, rhymes, activities, and local art, all aligned with developmental goals. This ensures a joyful and engaging start to a child’s educational journey.
Young children naturally communicate through drawing, movement, song, and imaginative play. At this stage, arts education does not ask a child to “learn” painting or music in any formal sense. Instead, these forms become the medium through which early concepts of language, number sense, and the physical world are explored and internalised.
Upper primary stage: exploring materials and techniques
As children move into the upper primary years, NCERT’s arts syllabus introduces more structured engagement with media and methods. At the upper primary stage, the art education programme includes handling materials for drawing, painting, collage, clay modelling, and puppet construction. Learners create artistic works through free expression, develop simple concepts of visual arts, and gain knowledge of the work of well-known artists, both contemporary and historical. The emphasis remains on the learner’s own imagination and the development of individual concepts through observation and exploration.
This is also the stage where the connection between arts and cultural identity becomes more conscious. Learners are introduced to regional and folk art traditions, beginning to understand arts not just as a skill but as a living record of community and heritage.
NCERT recommends that arts education, including visual arts, theatre, music, dance, and crafts, be a compulsory subject up to Grade 10. It allocates 130-150 hours per year for arts at the primary stage, rising to 160-180 hours annually at the higher secondary stage. These are not token time allocations – they reflect a genuine commitment to arts as a consistent presence across schooling.
Secondary stage: specialisation, aesthetics, and cultural heritage
At the secondary level, arts education shifts from general exploration towards refinement and specialisation. The experience of free and creative expression and acquaintance with the basic elements of arts and design at the upper primary stage equips learners with the aesthetic sensibility and skills in different media and techniques that enable them to select visual arts as a medium of expression at the secondary stage of school education.
The goals at this stage are correspondingly richer. Secondary arts education aims to refine aesthetic sensibilities based on earlier experiences, expose learners to the cultural diversity of the country through folk art forms and local arts, develop a perspective of artistic and creative expression through experimentation with different tools and techniques in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional visual art forms, and build values for social and cultural harmony leading to global peace.
These are not modest objectives. They connect individual creative development to civic consciousness and cultural understanding – a reminder that arts education, at its best, does far more than teach someone to draw or sing.
Why this matters: the case for arts across the curriculum
The policy commitments described above are backed by a growing body of evidence. Research demonstrates that art education has a positive impact on cognition, imagination, and overall academic performance. It can also foster a sense of cultural awareness and appreciation, leading to a more inclusive and diverse society. Studies have found that learners who participate in arts education are more likely to excel in other academic areas, such as mathematics and science.
The mechanisms behind these gains are well-documented. Engaging in arts education activities improves cognitive skills, enhances test scores, increases student engagement and motivation, develops language and literacy abilities, and contributes to a positive school climate. Arts education also has a social dimension. Researchers have described positive correlations between participation in arts education programmes and social skills such as self-confidence, self-control, conflict resolution, collaboration, empathy, and social tolerance.
A large-scale study published by Brookings Institution found that randomly assigning arts educational opportunities to elementary and middle school students reduced disciplinary infractions, improved writing achievement, and increased emotional empathy. Students in elementary schools also experienced increases in school engagement and college aspirations. These are outcomes that go well beyond what is typically expected of a drawing class or a music period.
Challenges in implementation
The gap between policy intent and classroom reality remains a genuine concern. Limited resources, lack of trained educators, and the prioritisation of standardised testing often hinder the effective integration of arts education into the curriculum. In many schools, arts periods are the first to be sacrificed when exam pressure mounts. Specialist arts teachers are in short supply, particularly in government schools in smaller towns and rural areas.
There is also the challenge of assessment culture. When parents, institutions, and even learners themselves judge educational success primarily through marks in core subjects, arts can feel expendable. Making arts a formally graded co-scholastic area, as CBSE has done, helps counter this perception – but only if the grade actually carries weight in how children and schools are evaluated.
Teacher preparation is another critical piece. Art-integrated learning requires teachers who are comfortable working across subject boundaries and who can design activities that genuinely fuse artistic expression with academic content. This demands investment in professional development, not just policy announcements.
The broader vision: arts as a way of knowing
What unites NEP 2020’s policy direction, CBSE’s co-scholastic framework, and NCERT’s stage-wise curriculum is a shared conviction: arts are not ornamental. They represent a fundamentally different way of knowing and making sense of the world – one that is observational, expressive, and culturally embedded.
When a child enacts a historical event through theatre, they are not decorating a history lesson. They are inhabiting it. When they represent a mathematical concept through a geometric rangoli pattern, they are not making maths prettier. They are extending their understanding into a new register. This is what art-integrated education, done well, actually achieves.
By breaking traditional subject boundaries, the NEP framework encourages learners to explore diverse fields, integrating arts, sciences, and vocational subjects – building the kind of flexible, creative thinking that serves people well beyond formal schooling.
What do you think? Do schools in your experience treat arts as equally important to science or mathematics – or do they still occupy second-class status in the timetable? And if arts genuinely improve academic performance and social skills, what would it take for this evidence to actually reshape how schools allocate time and resources?
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