By Sarah Miller
Graduating college during this recession has made me realize what a poor job my parents did at timing my conception. I mean, could there be a worse time to be looking for a job? Or better yet, could there be a worse time to be looking for a job in something other than a science or math field? Anytime I relay to a family member or friend that my degree is in English, there is a long, awkward pause followed by the standard, “what can you do with that?”
I can count on one hand the number of my friends who landed jobs before they graduated and all of them either had the word “science” or “business” in their degree titles. In this technological age it seems the need for creative types is gradually waning. Most viable careers out there are in some sort of science and mathematics/business/accounting fields – things dealing with complex statistics or atomic structures, all of which give me hives.
While I may bellyache about the lack of opportunities for an English major these days, the truth is there are far less opportunities for people with talents even further on the fringes. Today America is in a race with the rest of the world to always be on top, which requires the focus of the most intelligent and productive people to be on things like medicine, robotics, and engineering.
While it is understandable why our society has a burning obsession with these disciplines – they are, after all, the fields that will cure cancer and find that evasive alternative fuel the world will actually use – when people spend the majority of their lives sequestered behind heat resistant goggles in a chemistry lab or with their butts perma-formed to their ergonomically correct office chairs after sleepless nights glued to their slide rulers, what is the price? The result is adults who can perfectly diagram any carbon-based atomic structure and perform a cardiac incision with a running whipstitch, but who can’t craft an intelligible thank you note to save their lives, or sit still through a Broadway musical, and in all likelihood have the people skills of a cucumber.
What is this teaching the next generation about the value of the arts and creativity? In 2006, Sir Ken Robinson gave a stirring speech at the annual TED Talks in which he made the resounding proclamation that “We are educating people out of their creativity.” He questioned why we aren’t committed to teaching dance like we are mathematics and claimed that education is “strip mining our minds” – we mine only the “valuable” resources like math and science and leave behind the creativity as the slag. He told an anecdote about a woman who was stigmatized as “different” and diagnosed with ADHD because she couldn’t sit through classes and lacked focus until a psychologist suggested her parents enroll her in dance classes where her truly extraordinary talent for dance was unearthed. According to Mr. Robinson, it is people like this who are left behind in our society because they do not fit the current definition a “productive citizen.”
Dancers, painters, sculptors, writers, and musicians (to name a few) are being relegated to the bottom of the social food-chain. They are called “artsy,” and seen as talented people with recognizable skills, but skills that are not really bettering or furthering society. One of my former English professors at John Carroll University, Dr. Phil Metres, gave an elegant assessment of this situation. He said “artists and intellectuals don’t contribute to survival the way that an engineer or doctor might, but they contribute to living. The difference is lost on too many people.”
So where does all this leave us in twenty or thirty years if we continue on this trajectory? What will happen to the next generation of Baryshnikovs and Ansel Adams when science and technology completely engulf the humanities? The September 2010 issue of Popular Science answered this question as if I had posed it to the magazine directly when it ran a section called “10 Best jobs of the future.” Among those listed were “human/robot interaction specialist,” “space pilot,” “organ (as in body parts) designer,” “galactic architect,” and perhaps the most disturbing – “thought hacker.”
I’d be lying if I said I had a solution to this problem. The prospect just sits there like a black cumulonimbus, and I’m actually left with more questions than I’ve answered. But perhaps the place to start is at the very beginning. Dr. Metres cited “uncreative teaching” as one of the culprits behind the crassness of advanced society and I can’t help but agree with him as I remember some of the drones I had for teachers early in my education. But then I remember some of the gems who made me excited for school every day – an English teacher who put the fear of God in my fourteen-year-old self but cultivated in me a love for writing, a reading teacher who took an incredibly dull subject like fifth grade reading and somehow made that class a blast, and my freshman year science teacher who believed that engaging the right side of the brain was essential to helping me enjoy science despite my irritation with significant figures.
We need to instill in children the value of the arts at an early age, let them decide for themselves whether they would like to be a space pilot or a member of the Russian Ballet. We need to eliminate that paralyzing anxiety that overcomes them when they are looking for colleges and realize they must pursue a degree in business administration or theoretical physics if they wish to have any hope of future employment.
How exactly can we prevent “artsy” individuals from feeling like they’ve been shunned to the back of the fridge with the expired yogurt and questionable leftovers? How can we encourage them to dream of becoming anything they want? I think Ken Robinson answers these questions in the best way possible at the moment. Robinson says that the key to addressing our culture’s maligning of creativity is to see “our creative capacities for the richness they are and [see] our children for the hope that they are. Our task is to educate their whole being so they can face this future.”
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Sarah,
As I read this article I could actually feel my blood pressure rising as I was characterized as someone who can’t write an intelligible sentence and likely has the social skills of a cucumber. However, I do agree with a lot of what you said about our education system, but I could have done with a bit less of you attempting to assert your intellectual and social superiority over us boorish technical workers.
However, I will agree that our public education system is like a factory that is attempting to stamp out citizens that have a base set of required knowledge. Whatever can’t be readily identified as a useful skill is left undeveloped or is taught in such a bad manner as to kill off interest in the topic. 11th grade English ruined Dostoevsky for me for a decade. However, this factory does no favors even to the subjects it attempts to develop. Math is a great example of this. Math is always talked about as being essential, but the manner in which it is taught kills the topic for most people. The Mathematician’s Lament is a great paper on this. Maybe if the way math is taught was changed the you wouldn’t get hives from complex statistics.
I find it indicative of the problem written in the essay that all the responses are internet fishing/spam. They’re pretty hilarious for being robots, and have all of the acuity of a coffee mug.
@Ben – You, my friend, are an exceptional cucumber – an example to your species. =)
I think you’re correct about our current educational methods and the way they sap what is truly good, interesting and beautiful out of any subject – particularly math and science. I wonder if this has something to do (at least in part) with the modern assertion that left and right brain functions are inherently distinct, i.e. math has little to do with intuition and creativity or language/art has nothing to do with brute logic?
I recommend writings by Michael Polanyi, a Hungarian chemist and philosopher, on the topic of science and its purported cold rationality. He points out that it is to a large extent the imagination and creativity that points the scientist to answers to her questions.
A strict distinction between the arts and the sciences is a farce, an illusion. Of course, the word “science” is from the Latin “scientia”, which simply means knowledge. The arts vs. science dichotomy is an unfortunate one and it’s rather interesting to note that it doesn’t exist, at least not to the same extent, in some other cultures (maybe most). The German word “Wissenschaft” (something like “knowledgeness”), for instance, is usually translated as science, but is used in German in the broader sense of scholarship or study of a field.
Ben, I agree with your observations about math education. Here’s an example of a step in the right direction that illustrates the importance of imagination, creativity, speculation etc. in this process of learning to think mathematically:
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover.html
@Samuel: Thanks for the link, I’ve seen that TED talk before but it’s a good addition to the conversation. Dan Meyers is making many of the same points made in Paul Lockhart’s “The Mathematician’s Lament” but I think he puts it in a more nuts-and-bolts way that you could actually take directly into the classroom. I love what Lockhart says about math, but I feel like it would take a lot more work to adapt his ideas into something that would work in a normal classroom setting. His ideal of a “free form” exploration of mathematical concepts seems more suited towards a one-on-one learning setting, such as homeschooling.
I just took a class on Human Exceptionality and it is truly a shame that students that excel in arts are not as appreciated as those that excel in academics.
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