Eat Your Art Out

One day while in the art room, I believe it was my freshman or sophomore year of highschool, Mr. Kerns played a Ted Talk, as he did religiously in order to inform his students of certain topics and to educate them while they went about creating art. I’d say confidently that throughout my four years here at Buckeye I have listened to well over one hundred Ted Talks, but this specific one really stuck out in my memory. I remember it really touching me on an emotional level, which eventually lead me to this article. It was a speech given by Ken Robinson, an English author, speaker, and professor of arts education at the University of Warwick, on how schools are killing creativity.

That got me thinking. Every educational system in the world has the same exact hierarchy of subjects, as Robinson pointed out during his speech. There’s math and science and history, next are the languages and humanities, then at the bottom are the arts. I’d say mathematics is fairly important, but so is drawing. No school in the universe teaches drawing daily and as diligently as they teach math. And why is that, exactly?

Robinson said, in a speech he wrote in 2001, “Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.”

This made me think of a quote by Picasso, “Every child is an artist, the problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” This coincides with the Robinson’s point exactly, he believes passionately that we do not grow into creativity, we grow out of it, or rather we are educated out of it.

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original,” Robinson said. “By the time they [children] become adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this. We stigmatize mistakes. And now we’re running national educational systems where mistakes are the worst things you can make.” The result is that we are ultimately educating people out of their creative capacities. All children have tremendous talents, and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.

Senior Ariana Zingales, one of Buckeye’s many artists, said that she will most likely not be attending an art college out of fear that she will not have an idea of her plans after graduating art school.

This is a major factor that all students are contemplating when deciding which college and what major, but this is a constant concern for artists. You have probably, if an artist of any genre, been steered away from focusing on certain things that you like on the grounds that “You will never get a job doing that.” I can’t even begin to fathom an estimate of how many times I have been told that. It is a piece of advice so profoundly mistaken that people everywhere are trying and succeeding, attempting and failing, proving people right and wrong. The world is engulfed in a revolution.

Gillian Lynne, a British ballerina, dancer, choreographer, actress, and theatre/television director, was a precocious dance talent from a young age. Her parents were told early on by her teachers that they believed she had a learning disorder. They, instead of putting her in a slower program, enrolled her into a dance school.

After her first day of attending a school of various types of dance, they asked her “What happened?” as any caring parents would wonder aloud. Lynne’s response was, “I cannot tell you how wonderful it was. I walked into this room full of people like me. People who couldn’t sit still. People who have to move to think.”

This is a perfect example of how society’s fixation on people’s academic ability is so incorrect, based off of the main subjects they are establishing one’s intelligence. This leads people who are brilliantly talented not to realize their brilliant talent because they failed a math test or something like that. Their skills are not valued in an educational setting, therefore they classify themselves as shortsighted.

This reminded me of a quote by Albert Einstein where he said, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

As Robinson said, “I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won't serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children.”