In "normal" school settings today, the fine arts are often left out of the mandated curricula. This is not true in The Program's curricula. However, not all fine arts are chosen to be included in their program. Adler writes,
"The fine arts we recommend for inclusion in the curriculum are music, drama, dance, drawing, painting, sculpture (or modeling), and crafts. Of these, the first three can be characterized as symbolic arts because they consist variously of notes, figures, and words, which require the students to engage in interpretation and expression. The last four may be characterized as material arts, meaning that what is required to make or transform some material thing; the activity of the students involves working with the material and discovering how and to what ends it can be handled" (Adler, 1984)(p.142-143).
This separation of what is and what is not to be included is very particular. However, Adler goes on to note the differences,
"... the distinction is real between a group of arts in which is to be dealt with is always a set of symbols, whether given or invented, and one in which what is to be dealt with is always a tangible object, whether drawn purely from imaginative sources or constructed to represent some other object already existing..." (Adler, 1984)(p.143).
Next, Adler writes that the school's attitudes toward the Fine Arts program is often wrong. To summarize, he states that the school's attitude is often skeptical, which will lead to 1) Poor Funding and 2) Poor Staffing. With the combination of these two items a school's Fine Arts program will have no chance of growing. Adler also writes that a majority of the time the Fine Arts program runs into monetary funding shortages. For this reason, he makes the suggestion that parents do the work and rais the funds themselves, by doing physical labor (upgrading theater stages, for example, on their own time).
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