Sackler Lecture Report //// Do We Need the Arts?
With Xinyi Zhu
Dr. David Skorton, Secretary of the Smithsonian, delivered a thought-provoking lecture titled “Branches from the Same Tree” on the importance of the combination of the arts and sciences in education. He began by highlighting the immense changes humanity faces currently and in the future due to advances in technology, which is predicted to displace millions of jobs and drastically change the skills needed to be employable. Skorton also brought up the challenges that face humanity due to a rapidly expanding global population, such as food scarcity and global warming. STEM education is crucial in finding solutions, he argued, but we cannot ignore the need for breadth.
We need “education that is wide and deep,” Dr. Skorton claimed, with depth the predominant approach today when learning employable skills. He listed examples of polymaths throughout history, such as Einstein and Lovelace, where the sciences and arts were intertwined to make a well-rounded genius. Quoting Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, Skorton pointed out that “one’s ideas must be as broad as nature if they are to interpret nature”, and the world’s problems need creative thinkers whose education is broad and diverse.
Many salient points were brought up in his lecture which make us think about what purpose the arts serve in a child’s education. Often, in STEM lessons, there is one correct answer and a preferred route to arrive at it. The training that comes from practicing these routes forms the basis of marketable STEM skills. However, the softer sciences, humanities, and the fine arts present problems which often have no singular correct answer, nor a “preferred route” in which to head. These teach the “soft skills” of dealing with ambiguity and finding one’s own metric for correctness. Such skills are necessary in solving the sorts of complex problems that face humanity now and in decades to come, yet are hard to quantify by a test score or describe on a resume. Dr. Skorton argued for more breadth in education, with justification which was limited perhaps by his short time on stage, and we wholeheartedly agree with the necessary action forward. The difficult part will be in spreading the urgency of this needed change across a country which has problems in its education system that extend far beyond what has been brought up in this symposium. To succeed in convincing anyone outside of an art-science symposium the necessity of this change, we think that more immediate, clear, and concrete justification for reapportioning energy in education will need to be advanced.
