With school curricula in the United States taking a hard shift toward common core subjects such as reading and math, arts education is falling by the wayside despite providing many of the essential building blocks of child development. Motor skills, language, inventiveness, academic performance, decision making skills, and visual learning skills are all bolstered by arts education. Adrian Paul and Ethan Dettenmaier discuss how arts education provides vital emotional and creative outlets for our children while sharing what organizations such as Fresh Artists and the International Child Art Foundation are doing to help.

In 2009, Hero of the Week Alec Urbach founded Giving From The Ground Up and its subsidiary, Alec's Animated Schoolhouse, at age 13. In the years since, Alec has reached 250,000 students in Africa and South America with educational cartoon films and comic books he animates and edits himself. GFGU has also delivered 240,000 school and medical/dental supplies to children in Ghana and funded clean water wells that bring health and hygiene to the students of new science schools they built in two African villages. "There are no heroics involved in making creative, consistent social change. It is my belief that to create a more peaceful and humane society, we must ensure an educated and intellectually hungry society," Alec says, "and we begin by empowering our children."

We also report on the latest world-changing accomplishments by previous Heroes Jack Andraka and Annaleise Carr!