From a December Op-Ed in USA Today comes an essay from Harvard president Drew Faust and jazz musician, trumpeter, composer, and educator Wynton Marsalis that has me thinking about why the “A” for “art” (or, I like to say, “art and aesthetics”) in STEAM learning matters so much. While they don’t address makerspaces specifically, the themes are familiar and emphasize, for me, why making matters beyond tech tools.
Excerpts:
Anxiety abounds concerning the demands of our rapidly changing and ever more complicated world and about the ability of our educational system to respond …
We need education that nurtures judgment as well as mastery, ethics and values as well as analysis. We need learning that will enable students to interpret complexity, to adapt, and to make sense of lives they never anticipated. We need a way of teaching that encourages them to develop understanding of those different from themselves, enabling constructive collaborations across national and cultural origins and identities.
In other words, we need learning that incorporates what the arts teach us.
The arts are about imagining beyond the bounds of the known. They embrace the past and the future of the human mind and soul…
Learning to play or paint, dance, sing or act, means constantly being refashioned, constantly demanding risk. “If you don’t make mistakes,” Coleman Hawkins once said, “you aren’t really trying.”
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These are lessons for how we all can grow throughout our lives.
In recent years, though, we have witnessed a depressing retreat from arts education in American schools …
We once knew better. In 1884, the National Education Association established a Music Education Department, and the teaching of music proliferated across the country. It is worth remembering that Louis Armstrong, born in 1901, has described being given his first music lesson — and a cornet — in a segregated, underfunded reform school.
As we lament the discordant tone of our national conversation, perhaps we should focus less on that which we can easily count. Let’s instead look to the longer run as we teach our children how to practice until it hurts, to bravely take the stage, to imagine, create and innovate and — after hitting that wrong note — follow it up with the right one.
We must teach our children to be ready for a world we cannot yet know, one that will require the attitudes and understanding sparked and nurtured by the experience of the arts.
Yeah. That.
Hat tip: Diane Ravitch’s blog