Growing up, our artist-teacher mother was about children. She taught the lower grades, remedial reading, and later art. She took us to museums, got us creating and respecting those who did. By painting, she taught us to slow down, create, and appreciate.
One wonders if society’s understanding of beauty – from radiant yellow sunsets to salmon dawns, reflecting on classical music to doing art – is being somehow lost.
For those taught young to be artistic, to be creative, to look for beauty, trust their ability to interpret it, put pen or paint to paper, and think for themselves, just to wonder – there is surely the ability to appreciate beauty. But are kids taught this?
The modern world is filled with so many distractions, a thousand roads to darkness on social media, and creativity seems last in line for encouragement. Where school and home were once about grounding, values, creativity, and beauty, are they now?
Creativity – and its twin, original thought – seem in retreat, sometimes banished, officially scorned, shooed away in favor of pure conformity, fear, and acceptance.
That is not what our mother taught us, not what she – the lifelong teacher and artist – modeled. She believed children were creations of God, original and able to see beauty if they were taught how, encouraged to create and think on their own.
That is how she lived, creating thousands of watercolors, teaching thousands of kids to create, inspiring a lifelong search for beauty in life, not ugliness.
The concern this column addresses is not whether kids have the power to create and appreciate – but whether we are asking them to search out beauty. Are we encouraging love of nature, art, and creativity or activism, fear, and conformity?
Too often, time to read, wonder, and create is sacrificed for some new ideology, a fresh resentment, leaving kids lost, misguided, and their innocence trampled. Is that our mission, or is more required of us? Is that what we were taught, seeds of peace?
Finding beauty – allowing kids to wonder, create, and appreciate – involves teaching that life is not after all a blur, but can be intentionally slowed.
Are we teaching that, or the reverse? If my mother were alive, she would have something to say, I feel certain. By not teaching beauty, the joy and confidence in creativity, kids hurry on, consumed in worry, struggling to be what others want.
If trends tell us anything, the need to teach kids how to slow down, think for themselves, create and seek beauty – inside and outside themselves – is serious.
Last year, the number going to art museums – where we are taught to wonder and marvel at creativity – fell again. More than half of all museums saw fewer visitors in 2025 than pre- COVID. Meantime, we have seen a 27 percent drop in art teachers since 2011.
Children should be encouraged to look for beauty, and in that process to be creative. They are naturally filled with wonder, joyful, tentative, but hopeful when young. They must be given space to grow, taught character, reading, math – and also art.
Encouraging kids to experiment with art causes them to be curious, as well as confident, original, and unworried. It teaches them how to wonder, search for beauty, and smile on finding it. There is a connection between beauty, art, and truth.
Wrote John Keats: “Beauty is truth, truth is beauty – that is all ye know on earth, and all yet need to know.” Whether beauty is truth or just a window on nature, God, and ourselves, it should be taught. That, at least, is what our mother thought.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, Maine attorney, ten-year naval intelligence officer (USNR), and 25-year businessman. He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (North Country Press, 2018), and “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024). He is the National Spokesman for AMAC. Today, he is running to be Maine’s next Governor (please visit BobbyforMaine.com to learn more)!
