Art
and Technology, Bridges
to a New World Order
Address by John M. Eger to the Fifth Triennial International
Conference on "The Arts in Higher Education", Madrid,
Spain, November 4, 1993.
Truly
we are living in the midst of a revolution in communications.
Today -- thanks to a vast network of satellites orbiting
at 22,000 miles in space, underseas fiber optic cables, wired
and wireless networks, cellular phones, palmtop and laptop
wireless computers -- there is almost nothing of importance
that happens anywhere that isn't reported instantly around
the world.
First, there is a major realignment
of power taking place in the world. No government, no matter how popular or dictatorial, can set
its nation's public policy agenda.
No, it is world public opinion that does that.
As Charles Wick, Ronald Reagan's
Director of USIA once pointed out: "How else could a dock worker in Poland, not a General,
create that great force for change, Solidarity? How else could an ordinary housewife aspire to the dreams of
her country and rise to be President of the Philippines? How could a black woman say no to the
ravages of apartheid, and the world stop and listen?"
A major redefinition of wealth is
also taking place. Walter
Wriston, former Chairman of Citibank, likes to point out what
happened when Great Britain entered into an agreement with
the People's Republic of China for control of Hong Kong.
Trading screens began to light up all over the world
and the traders began to trade.
Their trades -- like a global plebiscite -- reflected
world public opinion that it wasn't a good treaty.
Overnight, billions of dollars left Hong Kong.
Information, Wriston believes, has replaced gold as
the new monetary standard.
In the post-industrial information age it is information
or knowledge that is the new wealth.
The good news is that in modern day
parlance, our universities stand at the center of this information
or knowledge revolution.
Indeed, we are the engines, the knowledge factories
of the new post-industrial society.
The bad news is that education hasn't changed much
since the 13th century. Students are still herded into classrooms, professors stand
in the middle of the room delivering education mouth-to-ear. It isn't long before the students start
losing interest, usually after about the first ten minutes. We know their interest -- and "learning
efficiency" as James Dezell of IBM who is here with us
today puts it -- goes up when we show a picture or provide
audio-visual stimulation. We know too that learning efficiency goes
off the chart when the student asks a question or begins to
interact.
One thing that has changed -- but
not necessarily for the good -- is the curriculum. Ernest Boyer, former Secretary of Education, observed that Albert
Einstein believed "all religion, all art and all science
are branches of the same tree."
But it is distressing, Boyer said, children never see
these connections anymore. Despite the hard facts, as the New
York Times
put it, "that contemporary knowledge crosses traditional
boundaries and that the traditional model of a structured
university is no longer relevant," college catalogs continue
to bulge at the seams, creating a labyrinth, an almost incoherent
barrier, for our students to penetrate.
I am concerned about the outmoded
way in which information is delivered.
I am concerned too about the educational menu which
seems to have added courses at will, rarely eliminating the
distinctions between those traditional boundaries.
But what concerns me most -- what I wish to discuss
with you today -- is an attitude toward the arts; an attitude
that has pervaded education.
An attitude that says arts are a frill. An attitude which if left unchecked and unchallenged may well
spell the continued decline of our systems of education, posing
a major threat to the development of a global civilization
to match the world community already in the making.
The attitude that I refer to is simply
that the arts are non-essential.
Recently, a study by the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest
Fund found that while eight out of ten Americans -- and from
what we have learned, this is not a uniquely American problem
-- felt that arts were life-enriching; only half as many said
the arts had much to do with their daily lives. This attitude pervades the thinking in
all our schools. It
pervades our universities as well.
Thus when budgets are cut, and increasingly they are,
the arts are often the first to go.
It is not surprising that modern
education is so logical, left-brained and wrong. For until recently, there is very little evidence between the
arts, and success and survival in the post-industrial information
society and economy.
But the evidence is beginning to mount.
Less than five years ago, Robert
Root-Bernstein, a MacArthur prize winner and biochemist, completed
a study of 150 biographies of eminent scientists from Pasteur
to Albert Einstein. His findings were startling to those educators
calling for more emphasis on the sciences. For he found that" almost all the great scientists and
inventors were also poets, artists, musicians or writers." Did you know, for example, that Galileo
was a poet and a literary critic, that Einstein had a passion
for the violin, or that the father of telecommunications and
inventor of the telegraph, Samuel Morse, was a portrait painter?
More recently, a team of U.C. Irvine
researchers from the Center for Neuro-Biology of Learning
and Memory completed a nine month study of three year old
children in two Southern California childcare centers which
demonstrated that early training in music, singing, and performing
musical instruments stimulates the brain in preschool children
and significantly enhances learning. U.C. Irvine expanded its experiment to college students.
The study suggested that listening to ten minutes of
Mozart's piano music immediately before taking an intelligence
test significantly improved the students' performance. Their findings, which were reported in
the British Science Journal Nature two weeks ago, revealed that the students' test scores were
a mean of eight to ten points higher with Mozart than they
were when the students had listened to pre-recorded relaxation
messages.
Some practical applications are also
popping up throughout the nation.
For example, in the poorest congressional district
in the nation -- in the South Bronx of New York -- where only
one in four children graduate, a little school called Saint
Augustine can now boast that 95 percent of its students read
at or above grade level and 95 percent meet New York state
academic standards.
All this, although its student population is 100 percent
minority and many of the children come from single parent
families, plagued by AIDS, substance abuse, crime and violence.
The secret of Saint Augustine's success?
It is the arts.
It has built its entire curriculum around music, dance,
visual arts and creative writing. Even its science classes use the arts
to illustrate research and lab experiments, and history comes
alive through re-creation of events using authentic costumes
and period music.
The
National Endowment of the Arts is also committed to the idea
that art education needs to be put at the center of its curriculum.
Through a $250,000 grant to the Westchester Arts Council,
a program called Arts Excel, is in development.
Following three days of workshops at Manhattanville
College in Purchase, New York, 200 teachers and school administrators
are learning how the arts can be used to teach history, science
and math and beginning the process of developing a new art-infused
curriculum. Sixty-five
individual artists and twenty-one local art organizations
are providing their expertise too, to launch the program throughout
Westchester county schools.
The Edison Project,
launched last year by Whittle Communications, and headed by
former Yale President Benno Schmidt, Jr., proposes a total
reformation with technology at the center of the Edison design.
Students in this new school will all have a personal
computer and telecommunications networks linking teachers,
students, administrators and parents, including new large
screen electronic blackboards and interactive touch-sensitive
globes that will be used to teach Great Performances, lives,
works, ideas and problems inspired by the "Great Books"
curriculum of educator Mortimer Adler.
All students will study algebra by the eighth grade,
progressing to calculus by the twelfth.
Foreign language begins in Kindergarten, with competency
in Spanish and English expected by the end of the fifth grade
when students should also be able to read music, sing and
play a musical instrument.
I'm sure most of you are not surprised
by these developments.
You already know the value of arts in education. You may already know that there is a distinct
neurological link between the right and left brain, between
art and physics, music to math, and the importance of whole-brain
thinking in the post-industrial information age.
Yet today the arts are still seen as a frill, while
only math and science are urged on our young to our peril.
My
message to you is a simple one: unless we awaken to the potential
for a
renaissance in education with arts as a core component of
learning; unless we
restructure education and rethink the importance of arts and
the role of technology to
enhance art appreciation, extend art education, and reform
education through the arts,
we will not develop the skill base we so desperately need,
not only for the new
knowledge-sensitive jobs and a renewed quality of life, but
to liberate the human mind
to its fullest potential in the next millennium.
In closing, I would like to leave
you with you an observation of Isaac Asimov, the prolific
physicist and author of over 500 books of science fiction
who understood the force of technology and the urgency for
human intervention.
He wrote in his book Homo Obsoletus, "It is only the accident of the briefness of
our lives in relation to the speed of revolutionary change,
that makes the pattern of life seem static now; and it is
the folly of self love which leaves us satisfied with that."
Thank you.