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Director’s Spotlight: “Déjà vu All Over Again”
By Anita Walker, Director
Déjà
vu. It’s the feeling you’ve been someplace or experienced something
before, but you really haven’t.
I had that feeling recently while reading a column by Thomas Friedman in the Sunday Times. Many of you have heard me insist that everyone must read his book The World Is Flat or be left in the dust of a new age. You’ve also heard me bemoan Friedman’s omission of any discussion of the importance of arts and culture in this new “flat world,” as I’ve ranted against the stampede he sparked toward jamming more and more math and bubble tests into American classrooms to combat the proliferation of engineers and scientists being produced by China and India. Friedman’s book set off a new national obsession with math, science and engineer-envy.
I was absolutely delighted, therefore, when I read an update on the state of our flat world by Friedman in the Times. Turns out, he says, while we are busy obsessing over math scores, India and China are worried about something else: their lack of innovation. Both India and China, Friedman writes, “are wondering if too much math and science – unleavened by art, literature, music and humanities – aren’t making Indira and Zhou dull kids…”
That’s when I felt it…déjà vu. Except it wasn’t really. Friedman’s fresh conclusions had already been described half a decade ago by Shalini Venturelli at American University. I’ve been carrying her work around in a notebook, quoting the passages I’d highlighted in yellow to any lawmaker who’d listen for years. “As nations begin to grasp the critical importance of educational quality to an economy based on creative capital, there will be an international race to fortify the substance of knowledge that is taught and to re-incorporate the linkages between the arts, humanities and the sciences,” wrote Venturelli.
Friedman writes, “When everyone has access to the same technology platform, human talent…is the only sustainable edge.”
Venturelli: “A nation without a vibrant creative labor force of artists, writers, designers, scriptwriters, playwrights, painters, musicians, film producers, directors, actors, dancers, choreographers, not to mention engineers, scientists, researchers and intellectuals does not possess the knowledge base to succeed in the Information Economy and must depend on ideas produced elsewhere.”
While China and India have mastered rigid, rote learning and the mass production of engineers, these engineers are relegated to the back-office, supporting the ideas and innovation produced by somebody else.
Meanwhile, back in the U.S.A., a just published study by the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies and the Arts Education Partnership, Critical Evidence by Sandra Ruppert, reports that the study of the arts is “quietly disappearing” from our schools, the result of “shifting priorities and budget cuts.” This despite a growing body of research that links enrollment in arts courses and higher SAT scores, visual arts instruction and reading readiness, dance and nonverbal reasoning, music and math, cognitive reasoning and the arts. A 2005 Harris Poll found strong public support for the arts in education: 93% say the arts are vital for a well-rounded education; 79% say that’s what’s missing in education today.
So with more and more convincing research, and strong public support, why are the arts the last added and the first dropped in schools across America? Are we waiting for other countries to raise the bar first?
Déjà vu.
