How I Was Subtly Schooled to Believe the Arts Were Inferior to the Sciences
But now I know better — disciplines complement each other.
Back in my former secondary school, you’d find girls in the arts gossiping about how proud the boys in the sciences are.
Some science boys would do ridiculous things just because. I remember two science boys writing two different love letters to the same art girl just to prove a point.
What point? That she’d fall for both of them. Weird but facts. Their ego was that unchecked.
In fact, most science girls didn’t roll with art girls. Again, unnecessary ego. Unwarranted superiority.
The superiority the science folks felt and the consequent inferiority felt by the art folks was an unwritten rule. It was unwritten and sometimes spoken in hush voices but it was there.
Let us rewind a bit.
I attended a public secondary school. Of course, it was cheap but we paid the price in other ways; awful restrooms, awful classrooms, uneven education — only the hard skills.
Like most secondary schools around, there were 3 class divisions one had to choose from as you get to the senior classes — the arts (now renamed as humanities), commercials (the business and accounting stuff), and the sciences (math, biology, etc).
But there was a hierarchy.
The Sciences >> Commercials >> the Arts.
The system of education made it look like the sciences were more important than other disciplines, especially the arts. The high cut-offs and all the stories told in whispers about how being a doctor or engineer could be the only worthy career worsened the situation.
The arts didn’t even have a merit option. If they did, it was so low that anybody could make it in there.
Here’s what I mean:
You tell the teachers you want to be in the art division, they’d say ok right away and process it.
You tell them you want to be in the science division? They first do a check on your previous academic standings. If it’s average, they ask you the question again as if you didn’t tell them the first time.
They urge you to reconsider your options and give you some weird pep talk about how the sciences aren’t for everyone.
I get it. The sciences are challenging and demanding. But the arts are not less challenging and demanding.
Well, I don’t exactly blame the teachers because where else would they put those students that fail to meet the science cut-offs? If the system is such that only the first option out of three is by merit, failure to meet those merits automatically makes the second and third option a default.
So, most people in the arts division back in secondary school were there because they couldn’t make the cut to the sciences, or wanted to be lawyers (which is worrying).
However, thinking of one discipline as being superior to the other is wrong. This isn’t even about equality, it’s about complement.
Disciplines complement one another.
It’s not even that they should complement each other. They naturally do. You’re not a complete being until you have an interwoven understanding of the various disciplines. I mean, how can you even be ok with one-sided knowledge?
Remember that life is all of these disciplines. Everything. Everything including the ones I didn’t mention, subsets of the ones I mentioned, and intersections between all of them.
These disciplines are branches of life’s knowledge like categories and categories are just that — categories.
Nothing more.
Now I know better
I started to notice the expressive part of me in my second year at the university.
At first, I did weird things like changing my afro to a full-blown curled hair. I remember one of my then lecturers asking me to leave his class because to him, I looked ‘unserious’. Funny but I still aced the damn course.
Then I began to volunteer to be a part of different events that piqued my interests like storytelling groups and youth empowerment-related ones. I wrote for a bit but it was extremely naive, extremely informal, and lacked any particular audience.
I wrote poetry, managed events, tried to sing, folded origami, played around with comedy, tried acting…whoo! what a long list of trials.
My point is, I wanted to express myself no matter what. It didn’t matter the form or medium, it didn’t matter my discipline (engineering), I just wanted to make expressions.
So, now I know better.
One thing I find that people give permission to restrict them from exploring what other disciplines look like is a career path. Precisely, a rigid career path.
You’re fresh out of university and you hop on some career-long journey to where again?
You go about this for how long again?
You go, go, go and you keep going along that career path in a rigid way and you literally don’t have much significant knowledge about other worlds. Isn’t that a bit limiting?
As for me, I don’t want to be only this or that. I want to be a lot of things across various disciplines. Yes, there’s the downside of not truly being the best at these activities but that is debatable.
I want to be able to stretch my hands across disciplines and link them. I want to be at the intersections. I like junctions, anyway — hard to understand but when you do, you get the traffic. Both literally and figuratively.
By the way, that right there is a mad rap line.
You’re expressive. You’re human.
See, there’s no denying that we all have something in us that’s just waiting to be expressed. That’s the art in us.
We can suppress it. We can treat it like shit. We can ignore it. But the more we do all these anti-art things, the more we become less expressive, hence less human.
Whatever it is that makes you expressive — making music, painting, dancing, modelling — whatever, please don’t stop doing it. Because after all said and done, that’s the real shit that makes you happy.
Not your 9-to-5, not your logical mind, none of that. Only your expressions, your art, and the memories you make with them make you feel alive and present.
I will leave you with the famous and counterintuitive words of Oscar Wilde:
Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.
Well, whichever one imitates the other, it is clear that life and art are copies of each other.
