Three major issues with the last couple of posts:
1) To put it lightly (much more so than what I first wrote down), we are “encroaching” on engineering elitism. It is fine to take satisfaction in your field of study, I’d encourage it. However, never think that, by some sort of celestial right bestowed upon you by your field of study, you are superior to other fields of study. To quote Hemingway, “There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self”.
2) Confusion on or ignorance of the benefit of arts education in general curriculums (more towards Jhakes post)
3) The purpose of education (more towards oldfieldguy’s post but also general commentary)
Arts Education
If you want to say, so stridently (and ignorantly), that arts education offers little to no benefit to students (and, by extension, society), you’ve got a bit of an uphill battle. You see, most education professionals, cognitive development scientist, neuroscientists and psychologist would disagree with that. These professionals don’t write papers based off anecdotally stories or observations from people they dated, they do so based off careful study in both controlled experiments and from real-world statistical results. The result: art education is instrumental in cognitive development.
Just a
few references to
support this
statement. Also, read or
watch anything by Ken Robinson.
There is also a common conflation of the ease/difficulty of a class and its uselessness/importance. People see the move away from route memorization testing to more modern, exploratory learning as a means of catering to this “lazy” generation of “entitled” children/parents (they said that about my generation, my parents generation, my grandparents generation...). You hear statements like “back in my day we had to memorize X by age Y. Now a days, kids just do finger painting and get a smiley face for a grade”. Well guess what, the former was an ineffective way of teaching and the latter is just patiently false and purposely hyperbolic. This is not about getting students to work less hard, it’s about using the hard work of educators (in both academia and in the classroom) to get students to work more efficiently. It’s this conflation that prevents educators from moving in a progressive, positive direction.
Let’s also make it quite clear that I’m not defending (the absurd) No Child Left Behind Policy or other such short sighted attempts to artificially boost artificial grades. What I am advocating is progressive attempts to improve the learning and testing process from the traditional route memorization “learning” method and standardized, fact regurgitation testing.
This comic perfectly encapsulates the problem in our current system, the problem that some people seem to argue tooth and nail to maintain.
Purpose of Education
I believe that part of the reason for the conflation stated above is due to a confusion over the purpose of grade school education (in addition to a quasi-sadistic notion that if my education was an awful experience then it should remain that way for other generations – I’m, sadly, only slightly kidding). The purpose of grade school education is (or ought to be, and I’d be glad to debate this) to develop global citizens NOT employable workers. By global citizens, I mean critical, skeptical, worldly, informed people. The latter is a natural by-product of the former (with the aid of additional job specific training) but the former is not a natural by-product of the latter.
For example, there is a push to teach computer coding in grade school. I’m ok with this as long as the focus is on developing logical reasoning in children and not so that they are more employable as computer programmers. The job of grade school is to develop the mind and make students capable of reasoning, critiquing and evaluating what comes at them in the real world; it’s about teaching students how to learn, not what to learn.
I need to also address the absurd claim that the powerful Arts Lobby “control
the purse strings” of the government (I rechecked to see if it was said sarcastically...). What? Since when do you see a group of historians, philosophers, anthropologists and sculptures put on their pin-stripe suits and go marching up to Capitol Hill to use their mighty influence to twist the arms of politicians. The only group less relevant to (and in) government than the science community is the arts community. And if you think politicians are political science majors, you couldn’t be further from the truth. Political science majors (especially those that remain in academia) are the biggest dissenters against the political system, because they understand its faults better than most, and are therefore the last people to be given positions of political prowess. Instead, they’re given to lawyers, accountants and businessmen (those that are able to bring in big donor money). And to say that law is part of the arts (in the sense being discussed here) is like saying that theology is part of the sciences.
Now, there is an interesting connection between who actually “control the purse strings” (and owns the purse as well) and the education system. The various corporate lobbies, the actual owners and controllers of the purse and the ones with actual political muscle, don’t really care about developing global citizens, they want employable (pre-trained) workers. Furthermore, this could be extended to say that the powers that be (which is not the arts lobby) don’t just want to encourage educating towards employment but they also want to actively discourage educating towards an informed, critical, skeptical, reasonable populous. It’s a lot more difficult to get away with some of the more ethically or rationally questionable decisions when you have a more informed populous critiquing them. This is why I have an issue with the nationalistic approach to our education with minimal exposure to global issues (especially global issues from THEIR prospective); it trains our youth to think that “our” way of life is the “right” way and the concerns of “others” are less important. However, I'm starting to get a little off-topic
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