| Art skills lead to thinking skills
Elliot Eisner, an education professor at Stanford University, has spent his career studying the mental abilities and disciplines developed by the arts. Here are a few items from his impressive list: � The ability to wrestle with problems that have no single correct answer. (That's most of the problems we'll ever encounter in life.) � The ability to analyze a problem from many different viewpoints. � The ability to absorb new information even while immersed in a project. � The ability to change strategies and even set new goals, if that's what new information demands. � The ability to make good judgments in the absence of fixed rules. � The ability to work with others toward a common goal. (Sports do this too, but we can't all be athletes. And in theater--or any art--everyone can be a winner.) � The ability to imagine what doesn't yet exist. (It's easy to assume imagination is something you're either born with or not, but actually, like any faculty, it can be nurtured or neglected, flourish or wither. And if you want to create something really new, you'd better have your imagination running, whether you're creating new software, designing a car that looks nothing like last year's model, or founding the United States of America.) Arts skills in the world of work There's a government agency I had never heard of until recently: the National Skills Standards Board (NSSB). The NSSB studies the job market to predict what skills will be needed in the future. James Houghton, a recent chairman of this outfit, says the future will place a premium on people who have "learned how to learn." Almost any specific skills you have when you enter the world of work will be obsolete long before you retire, he points out. What you'll need most is the ability to adapt, switch jobs, and learn new skills. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are probably enough if you want to produce a nation of competent clerks. But developing leaders, visionaries, and entrepreneurs? That's another matter. Their job description says "boldly go where no one has gone before." In the zone where they operate, answers can't be looked up in a manual or derived by plugging in some algorithm. The faculties needed in this zone are imagination, judgment--all that Elliot Eisner stuff. And how do you get good at stuff like that? Enter the arts. Art makes no sense unless... I heard about a kid who went to the ballet with his class. Someone asked him later how he liked it and he rolled his eyes. "They only put one team on the floor," he complained. "If they'd had another team out there trying to stop them, they'd have had something." Now there's a good argument for involving kids in the arts early. If you've never had much contact with the arts yourself, you may not understand them enough to appreciate and enjoy. That's just as true for the arts as it is for baseball. And the arts must be worth appreciating because we revere them, don't we? Our museums look like palaces. Our symphony halls and opera houses--in grandeur, they rank right up there with government buildings and banks. Judging by our buildings, you'd have to assume what we cherish most are power, money and ... art. Not to be crass, but as a society we've got billions invested in high art, and a lot of it is taxpayer money. So shouldn't we taxpayers get the tools we need to enjoy this stuff? Art and money There's another side of the coin. Art isn't just the hoity-toity stuff at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's everywhere. It's in the air we breathe. And let's not kid ourselves: It's thoroughly braided into the economy. It's just that we don't recognize a lot of it as art. I'm talking here about a broad definition of art: Art is any effort to create something aesthetically pleasing or expressive. Never mind whether it succeeds or fails. Taking the broad definition, how much art can you see, taste, and hear right from where you're sitting? In my case, I'd have to start with my clothes. Some might not call my pants art, but I had choices and I chose this pair because I thought it looked good. And it didn't get this look by chance; someone designed it. On my T-shirt, there's a colorful logo. Someone painted that. My feet are resting on a gorgeous little carpet--someone made it. My dining room chairs are nothing special, but when I look closely I realize they have interesting curves made of bent wood, and the rails have been turned on a lathe. Then there's the lamp. And the candle holder on the wall. And the wall itself, which is done in a rough-plastering style that is supposed to be "a look." It's all art, and creating it was somebody's job. ~On to Page 5~ ~Back to Main Page~ |