To Train or Not To Train: Questioning the value of education in a postmodern age
From the incessant university rankings to the debate amongst academics and pundits about the "value" of higher education, clearly our international society values--the assumed--benefits of education. So much of the criticism of the ivory tower--most particularly its most lofty, elite spires--comes from former Yale professor William Deresiewicz who last year imparted students not to send their children to the Ivy league if they desired for them to life an examined life of meaning.
Many have analyzed and debated Deresiewicz’s arguments made in Impeccable Sheep and while I appreciate and relate to many of the thoughts he catalogues; I do not subscribe to his conclusions that a liberal arts education should eschew cultivating the individual in favor of cultivating global “citizen” who can lead by thinking universally for the greater good. As an artist with academic leanings, I think the most valuable part of any and all education is the discovery of self that, paradoxically, leads to the ability to see the oneself reflected in the other--even others vastly different than oneself.
Deresiewicz’s arguments might seem an odd place to commence a meditation on 21st century artistic training; nevertheless, I believe it to be a fertile starting ground when one considers that any educational process should, ideally, be an artistic one. One that balances art and science in the questing after excellence in a given pursuit--whether that pursuit be archery or data analytics.
On the most basic of levels, universities are turning out graduates carbon copied for law and finance careers (and the like) with the equivalent banality that conservatories and art institutes are churning out cookie-cutter artists. But as Deresiewicz points out about the Ivy league and its compatriots, I would like to delve into the dearth of creative rigor being demanded from tomorrow’s future “creative” class. That is, while students are being taught tricks to master roulades and produce a “hit” film, they rarely are being asked to cultivate themselves in a way that makes them responsive, flexible and fully alive as thinkers and thusly creative-do-ers in a postmodern age awash in safe, derivative output.
The relationship between educational bureaucracy and societal norms seems one that could be symbiotic, but perhaps presently, is more prohibitive to innovative, truly unique though both on the academic and creative fronts. The inevitable sway of the market on the educational system means we cannot hope for more holistic, societal change if the educational systems do not forge beyond the honing of technique to instead encourage honing of the self.
Perhaps we have to define "art" and "artistic training" as something beyond painting, singing and dancing. We have to acknowledge that art is anything produced through technical or skilled means that expresses an idea or feeling. Wikipedia defines art even more liberally stating that it is anything produced by technical or imaginative skill.
By this liberal account, it isn't far off the mark to argue that anything (from litigation to dancing, from financiering to sculpting) might be considered an art in the broadest sense. Even if law and finance do not overtly explore the big questions the artistic canon dwells on, they do require a skill to achieve an end.
While there is much to be said, and little coherently captured hitherto, about the relationship between education and society, between artistic training and self-cultivation, between the balance of technical rigor and the freedom to play; what is the most revelatory, interesting piece for inspiring such conversation--from Dershowitz's Harper’s piece--is his sensational title: “How College Sold its Soul to the Market”. I leave it to the academic experts to evaluate the veracity of this statement as it applies to the liberal arts; but when it comes to the “arts” to both formal and informal artistic training, it remains true for artistic training which seems to value the clearing of hurdles and checking off of boxes over the more subtle--yet profound--development of voice, vision and ownership of the very foibles and flaws which, paradoxically, make one unique within a given, often times homogenous, discipline. The questions of how to instill technique and work ethic without robbing student-artist’s of the innate joy of pursuing what they’ve been called to do/create remains the more pressing, impossible question. A question these (mis)musings shall dare to ask, circle in and around and hopefully live as an attempt towards articulating a new mode of not only artistic training, but moreover, self-education in the most fundamental of senses.