Aspen Ideas Festival Arts Track: Arts in Education
By Erica Sheftman
“Around the age of eight or nine, kids want to know how to do things right, and there is nothing wrong with that,” development psychologist and Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Howard Gardner said at the Institute’s Ideas Festival. “So we have to provide counter-pressures. Maybe there is a right answer for 2+2, but there are many questions for which there is no right answer.” Gardner recalled a conversation he had with a young student who asked him why there was a need for school when the answers to all questions could be found on any smartphone. “I said, ‘Yes, you can find the answer to all the questions there. All the questions, except the important ones.’ And the arts are one of those important questions. The answer can’t be packaged.”
The Institute’s Arts Program Director Damian Woetzel emphasized that involvement in artistic activity can “foster the seeds of creativity,” through what Woetzel coined the three P’s: participation, problem solving, and performance. “There are so many different ways to engage the mind,” he said. “We need to find ways to activate personal ways of learning. Unfortunately, we’ve narrowed these ways, and that’s where the arts can come in successfully, simply to enliven personal expression. Centrally, it’s about using the arts in service of a goal, and in this case it’s education.”
Jonah Lehrer, author of Imagine: How Creativity Works, said there was a need to develop artistic potential in the US in the same way athletic potential is cultivated. “We know we can create lots of geniuses, because we’ve done it in one domain. We are very good at producing physically talented athletes. We lavish them with scholarships. If we encourage our kids to paint in the same way as we encourage them to join Little League, maybe we can begin to emulate the success we’ve achieved in athletics.”
Gardner’s suggestion that every principal and superintendent should be required to have some background in the arts was greeted with a round of applause. Gardner noted that in Finland, which is widely considered to have one of the most successful educational systems, administrators have arts backgrounds and schools require arts in the curriculum for between eight to thirteen hours a week. Naming Woetzel, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and former dancer Jacques D’Amboise as key figures who have brought their artistic careers to bear on their interactions with students, Gardner said, “If we don’t have people in decision-making positions who viscerally understand what we are talking about, it’s going to be a battle.”
Woetzel agreed: “Right now what I see is a coordination issue...Some of it is money, but not always. It’s about using the resources that exist and drawing on the fact that the arts community is ready and willing to help, and if they’re not it’s because they haven’t been asked.”
“Statistically most kids don’t have a passion, and most adults don’t either,” Gardner said. “The arts are an area where people can find that passion…and it’s a deprivation if we don’t open that path.”
