The last thing we expected to see in a school where children only come to school for four hours every day was an art program.  Caring for Cambodia volunteers opened up suit cases bursting with canvases for 6^th graders to paint on.  It was their day off from school, but kids were peering through the windows from 7am waiting for their chance to create.  Was this a waste of their day since they did not leave with basic addition skills?  One man who was in these kids’ shoes nine years ago made us think otherwise.  Ti, now in his second year on scholarship at an art institute in Phnom Penh, walked around the room seeing himself in each child. He wondered how his life became what it is today.  He could very well have painted souvenir canvases for tourists to buy in the courtyards of Angkor Wat for US$2 each.  He knows this isn’t the life he wants, though.  Maybe what he wants is closer to the aspirations of the Angkor sculptors who carved thousands of figures into their temples to tell a history in a language everyone would understand. It is quite curious how this timeless language of illustration is so rare in schools that struggle for funding in the US, but here we see its impact 900 years after the Angkor civilization fell, educating a country about their history when little written word exists.  And in the classroom Caring for Cambodia students express themselves in a way no one ever allowed them to before.  So, can we be so quick to say that art in the classroom is not a priority when funding is short and children are not meeting international standards?