In Thayer arts courses, students benefit from hands-on experience and are actively engaged as they develop new skills. Our focus is the process, freeing our students to produce work that aspires toward increasingly higher levels of aesthetic excellence. Our grading system in the arts is pass/fail, and a student’s work is not evaluated in comparison to that of classmates. Competition is not a part of arts education at the Upper and Middle School levels by design, but Thayer students who pursue the arts in college or as a career path often find themselves uniquely qualified to succeed in these competitive settings.

Thayer art education helps students to develop a process for inventive thinking and creative problem solving, and learning to see the world in new ways. We encourage young artists to examine problems from different perspectives, and to resist accepting the first, most obvious solution. In Thayer arts programs, the questions we learn to ask are just as important as their answers.