Sackler Lecture Report //// On “Branches from the Same Tree”
David Skorton, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, made an eloquent case in his keynote address for rethinking pedagogy in U.S.-based educational institutes. Considering the changing nature of work brought about by digital technologies, by longer individual lifespans, and by the increasingly complex career trajectories charted by individuals over those lifespans, Skorton advocated for an education that is both wide and deep. Such an education would go beyond the anemic gesture towards multi-disciplinary knowledge that is the current state of the all-campus “depth requirement”. It would recognize the value of critical thinking — and recognize also that critical thought is cultivated by both art and science. If, as Albert Einstein reminded us, art and science are branches from the same tree, then cutting off STEM from the arts is in Skorton’s words the intellectual equivalent of topping. Topping, in horticulture, is the practice of cutting away large branches from a tree, injuring the organism and instigating the inevitable onset of decay. In pedagogy, such decay becomes similarly inevitable when imagination and knowledge are decoupled in the classroom.
Positioning such a decoupling at the root of the reported decline in performance by American students in standardized STEM tests when compared to students from other nations, Skorton called for an integration of disciplines on a per-classroom basis.¹ This integration would occur concurrently with the development of diverse teams in which individual diversity of knowledge would not come at the expense of depth of knowledge, in effect creating collectives of collaborators that could speak the same languages.
Pluralities of language and collective collaborations bring to mind a thought.
It makes sense, I’d imagine, to situate a lecture at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C. within a U.S.-facing context. And yet, following talks from earlier in the day that positioned the original Cybernetic Serendipity exhibit, now fifty years in the past, as a confluence of artistic and technological practices emerging out of Paris, London and Tokyo (and indeed drawing upon the works of artists living in these locales but hailing from a much broader range of national origins), there is something troubling about not only the manner in which this year’s Sackler lecture addressed much-needed pedagogical practice as something of a nationalist project, but also about its doing so by using the notion of inter-national competition as a point-of-departure. I hope that is indicative of an originating investment — a laudable investment in the education of an emerging generation of artists, technologists, designers and scholars that is very much foremost in the minds of attendees at the Symposium and Colloquium — and not indicative of where the conversation here begun is allowed to rest. While the metaphor of the arts and sciences as branches from the same tree is surely as useful today as it was when Albert Einstein first conceived of it (though the mention of religion as a third and equal branch in Einstein’s original quote went, as pointed out by one attendee during the question-and-answer session that followed the keynote, curiously unaddressed), I wonder whether it might be useful to imagine that tree continuing to grow not simply by extending its branches ever upwards, but by unearthing also its hidden roots. Only by unearthing buried assumptions, by acknowledging deep-rooted histories and un-credited individuals can we replant that which we hope to grow within cleaner soil. We must remain grounded in pursuit of the bold ambition — “to redirect the history of ideas, restoring the Leonardo-like close linkage between art/design and science/engineering/medicine” — set forth by the Colloquium planning committee, but there is something to be said for drawing (as Ellie Irons, one of the presenters at the student Symposium does) the toxins from the ground in which we hope to grow. Such boldness must be an international project, not a national one — an international collaboration from the outset, and not a competition with other nations to be won by one. If we must retain the metaphor of a tree of knowledge, then let us have its roots be a rhizomatic structure that draws upon and supports a global system, fostering science and art, through collaboration, for all.
¹ Skorton later considered, following from economist Fareed Zakaria and in response to an audience member’s question, whether standards of evaluation for innovation might need to themselves be rethought, unable as they are to presently reconcile such declining test scores with the overwhelming evidence of innovation within the United States.
