The Humanities and Arts at Mills

By Eduardo Galindo

Mills High School offers a diverse set of courses for the humanities and arts for students to choose from. We have classes like Ceramics, AP Studio Art, as well as Woodworking for students to take if they are interested, and a few more classes. But are these courses enough?

The humanities and arts courses at Mills are intriguing and fun for students. They allow for any student to explore and find their interests and what they want to do in the future. It is important to have more representation of humanities and arts so more students can have the opportunity to find their interests that can affect their future college and career choices.

Humanities and arts are courses that give students a deeper understanding of ourselves and people in general. The humanities in particular are about studying people and how we interact with the world and each other. Classes regarding history, literature, and philosophy are courses that teach us various aspects of humanities. 

Ms.Donohoe, a social studies teacher, describes humanities as “Courses where we are reflecting on society.” Humanities shows us how we as people behave and why that may be, and by learning that we start seeing the world with different eyes.

Similarly to the humanities, the arts also change how we think and see the world in a much more vivid way. Art is about expressing ourselves in a visual way and like humanities it can give us an understanding of each other. Art can tell us how someone’s expressing themselves and what they’re thinking.

When we understand each other we are able to make decisions that are compassionate towards one another. Ones that help each other. These lessons we learn from humanities and arts, we need more people to learn them. Humanities and arts need to have more representation for students who want to learn more. 

By looking into the past we get insights of ourselves and of the world. Through art, poetry, literature, and letters we can see into the past and tell what they were thinking. We can even tell when it’s decades or centuries past. Art especially since it’s the oldest way we can see the past. 

As Mr.Christenson, an art teacher puts it, “Every human civilization ever has created art and that is how we told our stories, that is how we show our beliefs, communicated that we are greater than what we have been told that we are.”

Even though centuries have passed we can understand the past through the humanities, through the arts. We can see the past through these classes and are able to understand what people were going through during these times.

From these classes we can see the past in our own world and how they connect. The stories and beliefs are important for us to learn and we need more of them to see the world in a fair light.

With the lessons and importance that come from these classes, it’s no wonder why there has been a want from both students and teachers to expand further upon these subjects. 

A new class in the arts is being introduced to Mills; a dance class that will come be available in the upcoming year. Mr.Christenson mentioned, “One thing we have been pushing for this year is to have dance classes since we don’t have one currently.”

It is great we have another class students can take for art, especially one that’s different from what’s currently offered.

However, there are social studies classes that have been requested that aren’t in the works of being added to the class selection for students, namely Asian American History and AP Modern World History.

We should expand our options so students can take classes that they want and to expand their knowledge.