New NET committee structure

Tom Chapin: "Not on the Test"

Resolution draft for withdrawing your state from NCLB

No Dentist Left Behind

NCLB madness in Seattle

Case number two for art education:
This creative century

Type "creative" or "creativity" into any major online book vendor's search engine and among the "Creativity with Flowers" and "Jesus and Creativity" titles you will find titles such as these:
"Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation."
"The Rise of the Creative Class: How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life."
"Swarm Creativity: Competitive Advantage through Collaborative Innovation Networks."
"Creativity: Understanding Innovation in Problem Solving, Science, Invention, and the Arts."

These are not scholarly works. Serious treatments of creativity are making their way into our popular literature at a level we've never seen before.

What's going on? We are recognizing that outside-the-box problem solving will be more critical to international diplomacy, economics, education and other corners of culture in the twenty-first century than it was in the twentieth. Visionaries who imagine great things will be our heroes. Creativity and innovation will be prized. We don't know which nations will corner the market on these qualities, but we have a road map for fostering them: The arts.

When taught properly, math, language, science, and the arts reveal themselves as creative, even thrilling endeavors. Yet currently they seldom go beyond the pedantry of either test-driven memorization and baseline problem solving or in the case of art, cute holiday crafts. The fact that Albert Einstein flunked eighth grade math is a commonly known cultural tidbit; yet what is seldom discussed is why. If his teacher never took the class to a creative level (and from what we know of traditional German education, the teacher likely did not), a student such as Einstein had reason to fail: He was bored to death. If the teacher had taken math to a creative level, Einstein no doubt would have redefined the term "star pupil."

The cases for rigorous instruction in math, language and science are clear, well known, and accepted among educators. Great. What is poorly understood, little known, and narrowly accepted by many educators is the heightened global role that is emerging for the arts. We might say that "What is five times five?" is a typical math question in the sense that the students must converge on the answer "25." We might say that a typical English question is, "What is the simple subject in the sentence, 'The dog chased the cat'?" The students must converge on the answer "dog." A science question might be, "What kind of rock is made by intense heat within the earth?" The students converge on the answer, "igneous."

A typical art class question, in contrast, might be, "Can you arrange a square, a circle, and a triangle to create an asymmetrically balanced composition?" Every answer will be different but all might be correct. The group's thinking diverges. No other school disciplines foster this type of thought as well as the arts do. We are already well into a century that will increasingly demand divergent solutions to its challenges. Everyone who reads this can appropriately demand greater rigor from arts courses, as well as their gradual movement toward the center of the curriculum.
Warm regards,
Dennis
P.S. Next month I will offer my third and final installment of emergent rationales for art in schools: "Art, social justice, and a culture of care."
DF