“We received the news with great joy and hope,” says Emperatriz Montes, rector of the Educational Institution of Concentration of Rural Development, in the municipality of Saravena, department of Arauca, in eastern Colombia. He refers to the approval, earlier this month, of Arts in the Classroom, which “makes arts education a compulsory and transversal right in all public schools in the country”, according to the Ministry of Culture. The standard states that the arts are not complementary tools, but essential to student development, coexistence, citizenship and a culture of peace. “For the first time, our students have the opportunity to have permanent access to the arts and culture of the area,” says Montes.
The law transforms the Arts for Peace program into state policy, which the government formalized in 2024 and which has been operational since last September. According to official data, so far, 400,000 students from 2,616 educational institutions across the country have been accommodated.
Among its 1,300 students, Montes explains, 72% are registered in the Single Register of Victims of Armed Conflict. The rector explains that his territory is historically affected by conflicts and with few cultural scenes, so the permanent access to the arts that the law now guarantees allows students to discover and promote their talents, strengthen their emotional stability and distance themselves from armed actors. “Our institution places great importance on socio-emotional development, because no knowledge is possible without an emotionally stable and motivated person,” he says. He adds that the impact of this rule will be particularly significant among students in grades 10 and 11, “who are more trapped by the war.” Dance, music and painting allow them to “find themselves and develop confidence, assurance and tranquility”, while offering them alternatives to “the only entertainment that exists in these territories: canteens on every street corner and armed groups”, he says.
“As a teacher, but also as a mother and a citizen of this municipality, I think there is a lot of hope that young people will have these permanent spaces,” she said, emphasizing that the law makes arts education independent of the political will of the leader in power, to become a pillar of public education. “We have been asking for this for a long time,” says Montes, “we insist on strengthening arts, culture and sports. And now that it is a law, it gives a lot of hope.”
At the other end of the country, in the town of Tumaco, on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, the emotion is similar. Diana Cortés, director of the dance collective Pacific Dance and a member of the National Dance Council, describes the law as “a recognition of art as a transformative tool, rather than a filler issue.” He explains that this validates the artistic processes around which Tumaqueños have built their lives, in a place full of cultural richness but deeply marked by violence. “Culture served to create protective spaces for residents,” he says. It is precisely this work that is recognized by law, which, Cortés assures, has already “begun to have an impact here through the recruitment of teachers and the training and professionalization processes of this traditional knowledge”.
This is one of the great challenges in moving from the text of the law to reality: qualifying and professionalizing as educators those who empirically carry out artistic work. “We can’t ask math teachers to give dance workshops,” Cortés says. For her, this formalization is necessary if we seek to promote critical thinking and the transformative role of art.
Further north, in the port of Buenaventura, Rosana Muñoz, educator and director of the Mariposas de Amor reading club, which works with boys, girls and young people aged 5 to 16, also celebrates the measure. “Children arrive loaded with their context (crossed by armed conflicts, drug trafficking and conflicts between criminal gangs), but music, dance, poetry help them lose their inhibitions and move away from these burdens,” he says. The arts allow us to “recognize and manage emotions and externalize what we cannot always say with words.”
For Muñoz, the compulsory nature of artistic education will help to strengthen the identity and promote the traditions of each region. “We come from an education where we talk a lot about Europe and external realities. Understanding why my heart beats faster when I hear a cununo or a marimba enriches the students with their identity.” He adds that it is essential to create permanent spaces to celebrate ethnic and cultural diversity, especially in a context where, he says, young people often lack roots and a sense of ownership of what is traditional. “We fill them with a lot of other content; it takes a lot of gas,” he says.
This reinforcement must also come from education, another central point of the law. Muñoz recognizes the importance of teachers incorporating art materials as more didactic teaching tools. “If I teach the history of Buenaventura and ask them to paint what the city looked like before, I am teaching history through art and contextualizing its territory from a creative perspective.”
Hundreds of kilometers inland, in the municipality of Segovia, northeast of Antioquia, student leader Andrés Sepúlveda welcomes the fact that the law requires institutions to discuss how to build a curriculum with culture as a transversal axis, and also to include in this process historically marginalized populations, such as the Afro and indigenous communities, which have a significant presence in this region. However, he is cautious about the real impact of the rule while several regions, including his own, are experiencing an increase in violence. “Talking about culture, traditions, art, it’s not something that armed groups like. They limit it a lot. It is very difficult to carry out awareness campaigns and even more so with the idea that all this is to pull young people away from violence.”
For everyone, regulations are an opportunity to rediscover the human sensitivity lost during decades of conflict. “The war has made us all sick,” Montes laments. “This has led us to naturalize the violence and tragedy of our neighbors.” It is for this reason that he considers art as “the sensitive expression of the human being”, necessary to “show empathy again, which has been lost”, he concludes.
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