Thomas Friedman writes in the New York Times that the American public education system is preparing students for a world that’s fading fast, or long gone. Paraphrasing Marc Tucker from the National Center on Education and the Economy, Friedman suggests that an increasingly global and integrated world economy will make traditional ways of learning and doing less and less competitive:
That means…revamping an education system designed in the 1900s for people to do ”routine work” and refocusing it on producing people who can imagine things that have never been available before, who can create ingenious marketing and sales campaigns, write books, build furniture, make movies and design software ”that will capture people’s imaginations and become indispensable for millions.”
Tucker’s upcoming report, ”Tough Choices or Tough Times,” calls for public education and the curriculum that drives it to emphasize creative thinking. Says he:
”One thing we know about creativity is that it typically occurs when people who have mastered two or more quite different fields use the framework in one to think afresh about the other….” Thus, his report focuses on ”how to make that kind of thinking integral to every level of education.”
While this may seem a boon for arts education, it suggests a certain kind of arts education may be required. Certainly, the context, history, rules, and semantics of cultural expression will remain part of the mix — as they should. But truly creative thinking requires creation of creative work, not only the study of other people’s creative efforts.
And while ”labor-force readiness” always makes me a bit woozy when flagged as the defining goal of public education, it’s an argument that’s worth having in the arsenal. I’m glad to have Thomas Friedman on our side.
Very interesting. The Conference Board has also just issued a new report, “Are They Really Ready to Work,” looking at workforce readiness from the perspective of HR staff at corporations, which also reinforces the case for arts education as vehicle for fostering essential skills for the 21st century workforce. Up at the top of the list is Creativity and Innovation. Other areas of strong interest, currently ranked as deficient in graduates (HS and college) being hired, where the arts have a demonstrated positive impact, are: teamwork, critical thinking, diversity and oral communications. Another valuable arrow in our quiver when making our case!
Business schools (and economists) have already embraced the idea: Professor Jonathan Feinstein (http://mba.yale.edu/faculty/profiles/feinstein.shtml) has been teaching a class at the Yale School of Management for several years that embraces creativity and innovation. It was by far the most interesting class I took at SOM – especially as it was required for the Operations concentration. It was fascinating for me, a music major and arts administrator, to sit in a classroom of logistics and finance wonks and learn about dream analysis, creative connections, and Virginia Woolf. There’s hope yet…
What is needed is the teacher who is creative in their teaching. The teacher who loves what they are teaching and brings that love and joy to the classroom.
That energy is then passed on to the student who can become even more creative with confidence in even the basic knowledge that they have recieved.
Neither the teacher nor the knowledge is ever forgotten but keeps growing and giving.
So, given that in the West we’re a society of experts commenting on subject descriptions, and that our reduction of everything to fact has meant the average person hardly ever actually UNDERGOES in practice any of the human arts: musical instrument training (music isn’t fundamentally a subject but sounds heard and made); the dream analysis (extraordinarily painful – as real as skin cut and blood spilt)taking a week to seek daily needs in a wilderness with no media whatsoever; learn theatre exercises designed to open the sensitivities, intuitions, range of positive and negative emotions in a single human being; learn how to question a philosopher; spend a year looking intently at and drawing many different kinds of totally naked human beings. For the first time in -what -thousands, millions of years of human evolution, most of us, tragically, never spend the first five or so years of life playing outside in nature, without being organized, ordered, watched or otherwise having their private creative self invaded. That world -the private world of playing, acting and feeling as a single physical and private being in a natural universe where creativity is its law and its love – that is what we are loosing and why. It doesn’t cost money, though only the wealthy can now afford it -and believe me, they do. It requires everything that we are loosing -privacy, free time to play, wilderness, patience over years, the adoration of being alive above all else. Perhaps one day the creative wealth of our “undeveloped” societies will rescue the West. I hope so.
“But truly creative thinking requires creation of creative work, not only the study of other people’s creative efforts.”
I should have just written YES to your comment with this additional thought. Creative work originates from play and the early physical playful years -usually outside, and always unstructured- are essential to it. I am so terribly afraid that the West has designed a horror for its children’s early years and found marketing ways to dull children into taking it in as a required desire. But taking in, which is required by a consumer society, is the direct opposite of what is required of children in play – solititude, freedom to act and react and to suffer or enjoy the consequences. It needs the individual not the group, and in consequence, it creates the individual not the group.
Merry Christmas to all of us- with lots of time for play and the solitude to do it in.