But, first of all, I’d like to answer a question that you
may be asking—“Why major in English and
accounting?” It’s a question I do get asked often. My answer is always this:
“Because I love English, but accounting is practical.”
I will admit, when I was in middle school, one of my
aspirations in life was to major in accounting. By then, I was already thinking
about my future and what options do I have to earn a good, respective living,
and I knew that majoring in accounting and becoming an accountant was one of
them. Also, my parents didn’t laugh at me in bemuse when I mentioned becoming
an accountant (unlike when I was going through my photography phase and I
wanted to become a photographer), so I thought, “Yeah, why not.” Now, I’m
attending the school I’ve always wanted to attend and majoring in the major
I’ve always planned to major in.
However, when I look back on my middle school years, the
first thing that comes to my mind is not how I wanted to be accountant but how
I was beginning to love English during that time. In the sixth grade (which was
the grade level at which you started at in the middle school I attended on
Maui, Hawai‘i), I had this amazing English teacher named Mrs. Summers. She was
like Ms. Honey from Roald Dahl’s Matilda.
She was so patient and kind with her students, she never so much as yelled at
them as scold them in a stern yet gentle voice, and she was so passionate and
enthusiastic about English that she was constantly coming up with creative
writing assignments that dealt with autobiography, poetry, and fiction. In that
class, I remember how I got to write an essay about how much I admired my older
sister; a poem describing my cute little sister; and another poem about a polar
bear to go with a picture I found of one in an old magazine. Before that class,
I never did much writing beyond constructed responses to reading comprehension
questions and informative essays for science and social studies classes. I was
a big reader, but I never thought of writing anything myself. So when Mrs.
Summers had us write about things that were significant and important to us and
then had us workshop our pieces in class, I found writing a thrilling process
in which my quiet, timid self can speak without talking and be listened to
without interruption. English class that year became my favorite class, and to
this day, it still is.
Come my second semester of my senior year in high school, I had my heart set on majoring in English and becoming a published author. I wanted to be the next J.K. Rowling, Harper Lee, Jane Austen, and Stephanie Perkins (just to name a few of my favorite authors). But when I told my plans to my parents, they gave me looks of doubt and skepticism, hitting me with reality and causing me to choose something else. Or, at least, do something else.
Come my second semester of my senior year in high school, I had my heart set on majoring in English and becoming a published author. I wanted to be the next J.K. Rowling, Harper Lee, Jane Austen, and Stephanie Perkins (just to name a few of my favorite authors). But when I told my plans to my parents, they gave me looks of doubt and skepticism, hitting me with reality and causing me to choose something else. Or, at least, do something else.
Science was not (and never will be) my forte, and I had no
interest in engineering or technology. Then, remembering my goals in middle
school, I decided to major in accounting as well.
Now, I’m attending
the school I’ve always wanted to attend, majoring in the major I’ve always
planned to major in as well as a major that I am actually passionate about. Admittedly,
it is stressful, and I probably will have to stay in college for another three
years instead of two, but I’m sticking with it. If reality must force me to
think about what is possible (employable) and what is impossible (satisfactory
to me) and face how they aren’t one-in-the-same, then I will choose both,
passion and practicality. As a result, my understanding of goals and dreams has
changed: my goal is to become a CPA (a Certified Public Accountant) and work at
a respectable accounting firm; my dream is to become a book editor at a
publishing firm and publish my own work. Passion and practicality—I have chosen
both. Although, in light of the fact that I am trying to get an education that
will help me pursue my goals and aspirations in life, I question why I have to
choose in the first place. I wonder why my passion and what is practical cannot
be the same.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I know that there is nothing
wrong with the subject English. As a matter of fact, reading and writing, along
with mathematics and science, are considered important skills emphasized early
on in a child’s education. However, a degree in a language or art alone is not
enough to earn a good living, the usual cause for getting postsecondary or
vocational education in today’s society. Indeed, most people who get a degree in any
language, such as English, or in the arts, including art, dance, and music, most
often get a job as a teacher. Yet, according to the United States Department of
Labor and their Bureau of Labor Statistics, teachers as a whole earn on average
an annual wage of $47,220. On the other hand, computer programmers, who specialize
in science and technology in college, earn on average an annual wage of
$79,530—over $20,000 more than teachers—and industrial engineers, who have
strong backgrounds in mathematics and science, earn on average an annual wage
of $83,470—over $30,000 more than teachers (Bureau of Labor Statistics). Clearly,
no matter how well you can compose a sonnet, no matter how fluent you are in
French, or no matter how familiar you are with Pablo Picasso’s works, the
economy that you get from having that kind of knowledge is little compared to
what people with skills in science, technology, and mathematics get. In
Hawai‘i, teachers’ annual wage is not even enough to rent a two-bedroom
apartment, which, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s 2015
survey of housing in the United States, requires an annual wage of $65,746 (Bolton
et al. 61). Looks like you’ll be living with your parents after college—and,
quite possibly, needing to get another degree.
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| Left; right |
Public schools across the United States realize this
economic gap between soft subjects, such as language, art, dance, and music,
and hard subjects such as math, science, and technology. That is why they
demean those soft subjects in their curriculum in exchange for emphasizing the
hard and more useful subjects: they realize that subjects in the arts are not
employable enough in this day and age of technological advancement and
business. So when funds are low and adjustments need to be made, the arts and
foreign languages are the first to go. In fact, according to Stacey Boyd, a
former teacher and principal who published an article titled “Extracurriculars
Are Central to Learning” in the U.S. News & World Report, in more than 80
percent of U.S. school districts, funds have been cut, and the first programs
to go have been music, art, and foreign language. To these school districts, if
kids are most likely not going to amount to much of anything—won’t earn much of anything—in music, art, and
language, then there is no real necessity or profitability in keeping these
programs in their public education systems. These subjects are just not enough
to help the youth eventually face and enter the workforce.
Using education to enter the workforce—the logic behind
public education. How had that reasoning come to be, though? Sir Ken Robinson,
an internationally recognized speaker and leader in the development of
creativity, innovation, and human resources in education and in businesses, explains
it in his 2006 TED Talk titled “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”. He puts it this
way:
Our education system is predicated
on the idea of academic ability. …Around the world, there were no public
systems of education, really, before the 19th century. They all came into being
to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas.
Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. …And the
second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of
intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image. …If
you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a
protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that
many highly-talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not because the
thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized. (TED
Talks)
Industrialism and technological advancement was the growing
demand that public education had to meet. In Western society, public education
was the hope to garner from the general populace capable workers who possessed
the knowledge and skills to work effectively and competently in jobs and
positions that were opening up in the growing economy. Now, when industrialism
and technology have increased exponentially since the 19th century,
public education is putting more and more emphasis on what is more employable,
such as the ability to invent new, innovative cars, program fast, intelligent computers,
and build tall, indestructible skyscrapers, and putting less and less emphasis
on what is not, such as the ability to sing on key, write a poem, and dance to
a beat. Even more so these days, such creative propensities are being frowned
upon and are being highly discouraged, as shown by the lack of regard for arts
education in public schools.
However, arts education is a necessity, if not for the
immediate need to earn a stable income and produce products of economic value,
then for the intellectuality and cognition of unique individuals. Yes, academic
ability may help with such mental growth through their discussion and analysis
of what is universally true and accepted, but not in the same way art can. Whereas
academic subjects, such as reading, math, and science, provide forums that are
used and applied by anyone anywhere, subjects of the arts, such as creative
writing, drawing, singing, and speaking in another language, provide mediums to
express personal opinions and thoughts that give value to the creator and have
value when shared with others.
Take, for instance, the feeling of content exhibited by
students in a ceramics class at a Southwestern public high school. The students
were interviewed by Hillary Andrelchik, who has a PhD in Curriculum &
Instruction with an emphasis on Art Education from Arizona State University,
and Rory O’Neill Schmitt, an educational researcher and Faculty Associate at
the University College of Arizona State University, as part of a study on
students’ perception on art and success. In the professors’ article titled “Students’
Perception of Success in the Art Classroom” published in The International Journal Of Education & The Arts, trends and
analysis of these trends among the students’ answers to questions revolving
around their feelings toward their ceramics class are presented, and one trend that
came up among the data is of the students commonly viewing their ceramics class
as a safe environment in which they can express their individual selves. One
student named Jennifer expounded on this opinion and said,
It was like a class where you can
just like express yourself and you don’t have to do like tests, or like written
work, and stuff like that. It’s fun to have a class that you can just make stuff,
and like express yourself, and pretty much do your own thing. But like within a
limit, so I think it’s really a good thing to have. (16)
Jennifer and her peers in ceramics class saw it as a place
in which it was safe for them to be who they are without the pressure and
stress they usually feel in their other classes that require them to take long stringent
exams and write academic papers. Although their ceramics class has its own set
of assignments and evaluations that limit the students in what they are to
make, these limitations merely challenge them to express their thoughts,
opinions, and emotions in ways and through means that would be understandable
to others if and when they were to see their pieces in light of a specific
genre. With the freedom to be their individual selves and the assurance to not
expect rigidness in their ceramics class, the students found it enjoyable and a
relief from their academics.
Hence, as much as there is value in the unity and uniformity
promoted in the academic subjects such as reading, math, and science, no one
wants to always be kept within their rigid confines. Humans and their minds are
capable of so much more than just comprehending literary works, solving
mathematical equations, and gathering scientific data. As some point of gaining
all of that knowledge, they will want to make, build, create, and discover
their own ideas for to find and better understand their own individual selves
as well as contribute to what is already known in the world. Creativity begets
innovation that way: new ideas and perspectives are not born without some kind
of deterrence from what is already known and accepted. Otherwise, we would have
never known that the Earth revolves around the Sun and we would have never learned
about binary numbers and their significance to the language of computers, let
alone have invented computers. Rigidness and the concrete concepts of reading,
math, and science are important, but so are creativity and the inventiveness of
arts education.
Arts education is a necessity and an integral part to
students’ learning in schools. The creativity it fosters and promotes is
necessary for innovation, which is what is always sought after in core subjects
to further understand and expound on their rigid concepts. Arts education ought
to be regarded as highly as core subjects and should not be discarded
completely from public education systems on the grounds that funding is low. Yes,
economics suggests that what is proving to be least profitable ought to be
discarded; however, such financial decisions should not be made without thorough
analysis of the data and thorough consideration of possible alternatives, and
there are alternatives.
One such alternative is integrating art into subjects such
as science and technology. Also published in The International Journal Of Education & The Arts, the article “Learning
Across Disciplines: A Collective Study Of Two University Programs That
Integrate The Arts with STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, and
Mathematics]” by Sheena Ghanbari, a scholar and practitioner at the Department
of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, presents this idea
in its analysis of interviews of college students, teachers, and alumni who
have participated in one of two recent university programs that have combined
the disciplines of science and technology with the disciplines of art. From analyzing
the answers of the students, teachers, and alumna to questions revolving around
their reflection of the programs, the two university programs, ArtScience and
ArtTechnology, offer long-lasting learning experiences that have taught their
participants how to retain knowledge by doing and have changed their
participants’ way of viewing of the practices in science, technology, and art.
The ArtScience program emphasizes hands-on learning in order
to integrate the practices of science with the skills used in art. For example,
Ghanbari mentions on page 9 of her article an assignment in which the students
were divided into groups and each group was assigned a bee it had to learn
about and present about to the class by means of doing and sharing a sculpture of
the bee. This hands-on learning has been found to give participants an interactive
and collaborative educational experience, challenging them to not only gather
information and memorize facts but also look beyond the facts and apply it in
ways that are relatable to them. The learning experience will then carry with
them far beyond their collegiate studies in science. An alumna of the program
explains this effect of the program by telling Ghanbari:
Just being so hands on from day one,
it clicked. I learned so quickly and I cared more because I was involved in it.
It’s definitely something that makes you learn content so much deeper and with
so much meaning in a shorter period of time[.] …I’m a really visual person, and
I think with science, a lot of times it’s not visual enough for me. And then
being able to create that with your […]hands, it just really stuck in new ways.
(11) (Bracketed punctuation signals changes I have done to the quotation
myself.)
The content of the courses in the ArtScience program become
alive for the participants as they are asked to interact with the material and
information taught instead of merely looking at it, reading it, and memorizing
it. This interaction then helps the participants to make mental connections
between the material and their own individual selves, the material then going
beyond words on a page and right, deep into their own minds. With that
interaction, the participants are able to better remember what was learnt and
they receive an education much more comprehensive and meaningful to them.
This meaningfulness can also be seen from the reflections of
participants in the ArtTechnology program, which juxtaposes technological
skills with artistic skills to better understand the evolving dynamics between
the two in advancing society and in various cultures. This focus on technology
alongside art and culture encourages participants to be more reflective and
aware of the different kinds of perspectives in the world around them. One
participant of the ArtTechnology program relays this increased awareness on
various viewpoints by reflecting on an ethics course he took and saying:
It was the first class I took that
really made me look at a lot of things that I believe from a different angle…Realizing
that not everyone views the world the same way I did. Looking at it from their
side and realizing that they’re coming from a completely different viewpoint.
(Ghanbari 14)
The ethics course the participant speaks of blended art and
technology in a contemporary cultural context, forcing him to acknowledge
through means of seemingly disparate fields the different cultures, or
perspectives, that are present in today’s society. In turn, ArtTechnology, like
ArtScience, is providing students with a more comprehensive and meaningful
education that will last them far beyond their college years. They have helped
them retain knowledge and have broadened their understanding of, not only
science, technology, and art, but also the world around them all by way of mixing
what is structured, or rigid, with what is not so structured, or creative.
That kind of profound enlightenment is what education is all
about: to be able to take known knowledge and use it to gain a deeper, more
personal understanding of one’s surroundings. Concrete concepts can only help
with half of that purpose; creativity can do the rest.
Public schools are constantly forgoing the latter for the
former as they are always worrying over their finances. Yet, if they are to
truly help their students become successful in the future, then they need to
reconsider and rework their current notion of education. Reading, math, and
science are important, but the arts feed those subjects as creativity feeds
innovation, and so, are just as important. Without the arts, without
creativity, there would be no Romeo and
Juliet, no calculus, and no computer applications.
Which is a shame, because I like those stuff and I rely on
those things, whether I’m aware of it or not. Whether any of us are aware of it
or not, we rely heavily on creativity to have the cool technology we have today
and to see the amazing inventions surrounding us constantly. I don’t want any
of it to go away—I don’t think any of us today—not now and not in the near
future when those who will outlive us, the youth of today, will be leading the
future. That’s a bit unfair. For those of us who have no talent or interest in
mathematics, science, technology, and engineering, it’s already unfair.
As much as I’ve come to find that I actually enjoy learning
accounting and can see myself pursuing a career in it in the near future (at
least, before I become the next J.K. Rowling), I still can’t ignore my love for
English. I mean, when I come out of my Managerial Accounting class feeling
stressed, I become instantly relieved when I realize I have Creative Writing
next. Creative Writing is the only class I have this semester in which I can
write whatever I want (more or less) however I want, and I love how free and
thrilling that assurance from the class is.
I love English, but accounting is practical, so I have
chosen both, and thankfully, my decision is going well for me. However, not
many have that kind of luxury or opportunity because writing sonnets, dancing
to a beat, or painting a mural is all that they have ever known and love. We
need to remember that those creative inclinations are just as important to all
of us as they are with those artists, for it is their creativity that will
eventually inspire the invention of the hover car, the teleporter, and the nurse
robot.
Don’t those sound cool? I read about them in books and seen
them in movies—art, everyone. Art.
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| Left; center; right |
Works Cited
Andrelchik, Hillary, and Rory O'Neill Schmitt. "Students'
Perception Of Success In The
Art Classroom." International
Journal Of Education & The Arts 15.13 (2014):
ERIC. Web. 29 Apr. 2016.
Bolton, Megan, Elina Bravve, Emily Miller, Sheila Crowley
and Ellen Errico. “Out of
Reach 2015.” National Low Income Housing Coalition, 2015. PDF file. <http://nlihc.org/sites/default/files/oor/OOR_2015_FULL.pdf
>
Boyd, Stacey. “Extracurriculars Are Central to Learning.” U.S. News & World Report, 28
Apr. 2014. Web. 14 Apr. 2016.
<http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2014/04/28/music-art-and-language-programs-in-schools-have-long-lasting-benefits>
<http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2014/04/28/music-art-and-language-programs-in-schools-have-long-lasting-benefits>
Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Occupational Employment and
Wages, May 2015: 25-000
Education, Training, and Library
Occupations (Major Group).” United States
Department
of Labor. United States Department of Labor, May 2015. Web. 21 Apr. 2016.
<http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes250000.htm>
<http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes250000.htm>
---. “Occupational Employment and Wages, May 2015: 15-1131 Computer
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United
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---. “Occupational Employment and Wages, May 2015: 17-2112
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United
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Ghanbari, Sheena. "Learning Across Disciplines: A
Collective Case Study Of Two
University Programs That Integrate
The Arts With STEM." International Journal
Of Education & The Arts
16.7 (2015): ERIC. Web. 29 Apr. 2016.
TED Talks: Ideas Worth Spreading. Sir Ken Robinson. “Do
Schools Kill Creativity?”
Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 6 Jan. 2007. Web. 20
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