The school's mission statement is vague enough that I could fulfill most of the expectations by going to the supermarket or checking my email, or sitting outside a café in... Lisbon. If this is really why I sat through 12 years of school, I'm really upset about not simply being sent to Lisbon instead.
The fact that a relatively standardized and measured system like that of a public school would even use such a general and multi-interpretable method of evaluating goals is an example, ready at hand, of why art is ever important even in the most structured of settings. It's easy enough to tell people where you want them to go, what you want them to do, and how you want them to do it, but to tell them what you want them to think? Here the line of repression looms, and those wishing (wisely, thankfully) not to cross it are forced into producing the vaguest semblance of direction, concepts so broad and applicable they almost seem absurd from a practical standpoint.
Yet, someone must know how to interpret these messages, the ideas that fall into that category of the infinite and the perceptive. There must be people ready and willing to navigate the part of the mind that is not governed by the superficial or the arbitrary.
If anyone dares doubt the importance of art in schools, they have only their mission statement to look at. Without art, these words would mean nothing.
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