From my understanding of the world, the one thing that really separates humans from everything else on our planet is our desire for art in all its forms. Simply, we need the arts. We can’t go a day without some sort of beauty in our lives. I might even argue that we would cease to exist without art. Today, I want to offer an oversimplified argument for increasing arts, literature, music, and dance at all levels of education.
Let me start with the importance of art in our lives. A while ago, I wrote a book called Masking the Past, which should be published soon. While researching the book, I came across remarkable drawings made by Spanish children from the time of the Spanish Civil War. These children had been traumatized by the bombings, the death, the destruction of everything they knew. So, where did they turn? They turned to art. They wanted to depict their world in drawings as a way to understand it, as a way to ameliorate the traumas they suffered.
On some level, we all do this. When we go through something difficult, we turn to art to help us understand and to soothe our wounds. It could be anything from a Taylor Swift song about getting over a breakup, a romcom, or a play about Iranians taking an ESL class. To return to the Spanish Civil War, even a painting such as Picasso’s Guernica helped him and others deal with the bombings.
Even with this need, politicians and many administrators are removing arts from the curriculum or encouraging students to avoid literature, music, dance, and art education. The claim is that they won’t make any money. Even parents encourage or force their children to turn away from the arts. They want them to be engineers, doctors, or go into business.
The problem is that we have engineers, doctors, and business people who don’t know how to think. They can only replicate what they’ve been taught at universities, which have moved away from education and toward over-priced trade schools. That’s fine if there were no problems in the world, but the fact is that everyone, at some point in their lives, will confront a situation that is unlike anything they have seen before, and if they can’t think outside the engineering, doctoring or businessing boxes, they will fail.
Politicians do this all the time. Let’s take a hot-button issue like the Mexican-US border. This is a relatively easy issue to fix, but the people in charge do not have the ability to think creatively about the situation. They want to put up walls and increase patrols. But you don’t fix the border at the border. If you’ve never seen a film from Latin America about immigration. If you’ve never read a novel from that part of the world, you cannot understand the issue, and you cannot fix it. If you had read some novels, short stories or watched films by Latin Americans dealing with those issues, you’d realize that, for the most part, people don’t want to leave. You find out that what is driving them to the border is insecurity. One way to combat that, both at home and abroad, is to create opportunity.
In Central America, creating opportunity is easy. You use taxes to incentivize companies to move manufacturing to those countries. A simple change like that gives people jobs, it gives them hope, it gives them a purpose in life. They turn away from violence. They stay with family and friends and community because they can. There are some unintended consequences of this move as well. You reduce shipping costs and pollution due to the proximity of these countries. You solve the supply chain problem that CEOs have been unable to fix by encouraging the diversification of the supply chain.
The reason you don’t see this happening is that most Americans lack empathy. Well, any country that places STEM over the arts will have this issue. Now, we don’t lack empathy because something is inherently wrong with us. It has been systematically removed by really poor politics and a misunderstanding of education.
Now, some people might think that they will be leaving money on the table if they study arts or literature and such. Just the opposite is true. The fact is that you will advance further and faster if you have a good foundation in the arts and literature. Google did a study about what makes people move up the chain faster, and as it turns out, the list of qualities is all things that are taught in literature, arts, and music classes. And by all, I mean 100%, and these qualities are exclusively taught in the humanities and arts. Without those qualities, you will not advance nearly as fast or as far. I have met business people, engineers, and doctors with a foundation in the arts and humanities who all credit those fields with their successes.
The point is, that we need the arts, we need literature, we need music in our lives. Don’t let anyone take away what makes you human, and don’t let anyone take away what will make you a better, more successful human.
Henry James Morello 