Friday, November 9, 2007
They like me, they really like me...well, I got those skills on Broadway!
The role of the arts in today's education often receives little traction. Students that are exposed to the arts are often more creative and innovative thinkers. They approach problems with a tool set that naturally exists outside of the box. During our forums we have heard a great deal about "soft skills" (communication - verbal and written, problem solving, analytical and teamwork skills) and people from the arts community continually remind the Commission that the arts produce graduates with those very skills sought by business and industry. How do we enhance the role played by the arts in education today? Should we help influence K-12 and their inclusion of the arts in the curriculum? Do we have enough free space for artists to be creative in our communities? How do we foster creativity?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
One of the best ways to develop creativity and innovation is to bring minds on the cutting-edge into North Carolina to speak on campus. Universities can serve as a spark for the intellectual discussion of a community.
Being a business major this is of great concern to me. I think it was Michael Eisner who once said, ‘I’ve never met a group of people more inartistic and unentrepreneurial as a room full of MBA’s.’
I encourage everyone to watch the lecture by Sir Ken Robinson titled Do Schools Kill Creativity? {http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/66} In it he talks about how our entire education system stifles creativity by creating a fear of being wrong. Picasso said, ‘Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.’ Ken argues that our education system is predicated on industrialism and breeds us for that purpose.
Sir Robinson challenges us to rethink our view of intelligence. ‘We think about the world in all the ways we experience it, we think visually, we think in sound, kinesthetics, in abstract terms, we think in movement,’ and that ‘creativity more often than not comes about through different disciplinary ways of seeing things.’ If we are going to move forward into the 21st century we are going to have to shift our way of think so that we don’t regard science an mathematics at the top, then humanities, and the at the bottom are arts.
HERE’S THE IMPORTANT PARAGRAPH:
If we want to foster creativity we need to reexamine how we admit students. Right now we base entrance exclusively upon SAT’s (which measures ability in liberal arts), essays, grades, and sometimes extracurriculars because those are the things we can measure easily. Measuring someone’s creative ability is much more difficult, but it’s a problem that will have to solved. If we start to include an element of creative and artistic ability in the admissions process, then K-12, who’s goal is university admission, will have to fall in-line. Only then will we stop ‘educating people out of their creativity.’
{{wow, that's very tasty I think
___________________________________________
Chat
http://www.awfffa.com
Directory Sites
http://www.awfffa.com/dir
Forum
http://www.awfffa.com/vb
Post a Comment