Tod Marshall: Arts education integral to learning
Over the past several months, I’ve been privileged to visit schools throughout our state: private, public, elementary and secondary schools, as well as community colleges and universities. Of course, this means that I’ve been driving a lot; during those hours on the road, I listen to poetry readings and podcasts and mumble poems to myself.
Recently, I listened to a podcast of Frank Wilczek, Nobel laureate in physics, talking about science and beauty, the importance of imagination and creativity, and how art and science are not as far apart as school curricula might imply. In fact, in his most recent book, “A Beautiful Question,” he asks, “Is the world a work of art?” And he asserts that the scientist’s eye and the artist’s eye are closely related ways of seeing.
Or, to look at it differently, consider these lines from William Blake’s poetry that foresee the invisible world of atoms and quarks, perhaps even Einstein’s notion of relativity. In the early 19th century, he wrote, “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.”
None of which is a surprise, really. From Leonardo to Einstein, we can find evidence of the bond between creativity – artistic thinking – and the sciences. Unfortunately, in the past few decades, that bond has been broken. By privileging STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), our educational system has announced that a labor force for tech industry is more important than the cultivation of people’s sense of aesthetics, the joy and wonder that can be found in music, painting, poetry and dance. This emphasis on one mode of learning over another diminishes both pursuits and will produce – has produced – people whose communication skills, critical thinking and aesthetic sense is diminished: Why cultivate an appreciation of beauty – an important part of an examined life – when the newest iPhone app can provide that for you?
It’s easy to blame testing and funding for all of this; building a curriculum around testing eliminates the nuances that are so important to the arts. Whatever the causal reason may be, we need to rethink how the arts should play a large part in education; we need to revisit the bond between science and the arts and recognize that Arts Education Week is a token gesture toward a foundational human activity.Further, we need to think about how science is not just about how fast an apple might fall from a tree, but why the apple fell, how it shimmered while dropping, on whose head it landed and who owned the tree.
Of course, one of the arguments against spending a lot of time teaching the arts is pragmatic. STEM subjects are often connected with practicality – do you want your son or daughter to study poetry and become a busker in Ballard? Or do you want your child to study chemistry and biology and become a physician? Well, the answer might be more complicated than most would assume; if you really want your child to become a doctor, then he or she needs to be studying both the sciences and the arts. Mark William Roche, who wrote “Why Choose Liberal Arts?”, points out an interesting trend: According to a 1984 survey, “the highest acceptance rates to medical school were garnered by majors in music.” More recently, “from 1992 to 2006 the ‘rate of acceptance was highest for humanities majors,’ ” according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.
There are many, many more statistical and practical arguments for the importance of education in the arts. The issue, though, goes far beyond jobs. Studying poetry, reading the great poems of Langston Hughes and Emily Dickinson, spending time in silence (without phones), looking at a Monet or a Kandinsky or a Cassatt, making sculpture, listening to Bach and bebop: These are things that our students – all of us – need.
Art has been an integral part of human culture for a long time; eclipsing that presence because of standardized tests, budgetary concerns and/or misguided notions of what really leads to employability are choices that will impoverish our children’s lives. Instead, we need to figure out how to change divisive attitudes toward education and figure out how to best educate the whole, beautiful person that each student is – and can become.
Tod Marshall teaches at Gonzaga University and is serving as the 2016-18 Washington state poet laureate.