Creativity—The Commerce of the 21st Century

When people ask me what my best subject was in school, they don’t expect me to say science. Although I’d always loved making art, when I grew up I’d planned to be a veterinarian or a zoologist. My high school offered an amazing science curriculum that was rich in experiential learning. From raising and training a baby goat in biology to using ballet to explore physics principles, science inspired my imagination.

 

Later when I began studying art intensively in college, it was the scientific aspects of the field, observation and engineering, that drew me down the rabbit hole. Watching chemistry transform the surface of silver gelatin-laced paper, soldering brass and copper fittings, devising a way to project video inside the pouch of a kangaroo—I love the problem-solving that artmaking requires.

 

In truth, art and science were inextricably linked for eons (#DaVinci). And yet somewhere between the Renaissance and modern times, the two fields diverged—at least in the United States. The sciences became the bailiwick of tomorrow, and the arts were relegated to an indulgent pastime.

 

I blame it on Sputnik. A lot happened to our country during the period between the industrial revolution and the space race. We outlawed child labor, we created a middle class, we mandated a free public education for all our nation’s children, and our national identity and economic welfare became tied to the outcome of our educational system.

 

In taking that penultimate step, we opened the dialogue about what the goal of our education should be. Late 19thcentury philosopher John Dewey maintained that schools should prepare students for participation in community and society. Curriculum and pedagogy should be emergent in that the school evolves and innovates around the climate of society. Dewey-based schools are often places where art and science coexist symbiotically and still occupy important real estate in the core curricula. Many independent schools, including Catlin Gabel, are deeply informed by Dewey’s original goals.

 

By contrast, public schools latched onto educational psychologist Edward Thorndike’s “law of effect.” A contemporary of Dewey with diametrically opposed views regarding the function of schooling, Thorndike believed skills and concepts must be laid out incrementally and mastered over a prescribed timeframe. Thorndike further posited that the function of schooling should be preparation for the workforce and that people should be trained along vocational tracks. Imagination had no place in Thorndike’s mechanized system—how could innovation be standardized or assessed?

 

We’ve all heard of STEM, a movement to improve the teaching of science, technology, engineering, and math. One of the core pieces of STEM philosophy is that 21st-century thinking will best be done by people who can engineer and research problems in order to develop solutions.

 

John Maeda, the president of the Rhode Island School of Design, has been a fervent advocate of converting STEM to STEAM—adding arts into the equation. The central tenets of his argument are that any advance is useless unless it can be communicated, and that flexible thinking, risk taking, and problem solving are essential to any kind of innovation. Those attributes are exactly what is nurtured in a rich and rigorous arts curriculum. In essence, Madea’s argument is that creativity will become the commerce of the 21st century.

 

The mechanics of art production are the methods for expressing ideas. Just as in organic chemistry or calculus, the greater your fluency is with the methods, the more you can bend it to explore ideas and concepts. As a society we have failed to take the fluency and methodology of the arts as seriously as literacy or numeracy. Students have not been given equal time to develop their arts skills so they can feel in command of those skills.

 

One of our jobs as arts educators is to give students command of the medium, whether that is playing an instrument, working in theater, controlling lenses and apertures in photography, or drawing. With continued scaffolding and building relationships with students, we can help them build skills over time, so that we see kids who can dig deep and explore huge ideas through these mediums.

 

A good arts education will help kids unpack the messaging that the culture gives them about societal norms and values. The work of Matt Junn ’13 is a shining example of that. He learned to render early on, but it took nurturing in the studio to get him to apply those skills to analyze a bigger idea (see his self-portrait at left). He’s now digging into his identity as a Korean American, learning to control and appropriate images to unpack what they mean to him and what is expected of him.

 

Elliot Eisner, a leading researcher in arts education at Stanford, gives strong arguments for the value of arts education that are relevant to our teaching—and the reasons why Catlin Gabel has just built a new Creative Arts Center.
 

• In the arts you can put together your work in an infinite variety of ways. The artist must make sense of these choices.
 

• In the arts, you can head in a direction, but when things happen along the way you have to make judgments to adapt. It can send you in a whole new direction. That’s innovation. It’s where you make a discovery (#breadmoldpenicillin).
 

• How something is said is part and parcel of what it says.
 

• We can experience things in art that go beyond what we can articulate. It helps us live in a bigger place. A recent exhibit at Mercy Corps featured a mural project where the faces of abused women in Rio de Janiero were phototransferred in giant scale on the buildings of the steeply terraced city by French artist JR. The images bore witness to the atrocities faced by women who had been formerly voiceless in that region, and change began to unfold.
 

• The arts are a special form of experience because of the intense engagement of the creator with the work. People think this is all art is, but it is just what makes it unique. The material resists you, and you have to get it to perform a task or deliver a message.

• Art must explore through the constraints of its mediums. If we don’t create possibilities for fluency in the range of mediums, we are preventing ourselves from living fully in the realm of big ideas and being able to solve problems creatively.

 

Just as babies are born with a scientist’s hunger for inquiry, so too are people are born to be creative. Equipping our students with a rigorous education in the arts teaches them about methodology, purpose, understanding their audience, and communicating that message. We arm them with guitars and hammers, poetry and cameras. We help them give form to ideas, to innovate and to connect. Our students will be the change in the 21st century.