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Thursday, 8 February 2018

Full Steam Ahead. Why Art should never be left out of the STEM equation - a ReadItTorial

Posted by ReadItDaddy at February 08, 2018 Labels:
There's a growing movement that's demanding that STEM subjects are complimented by art and that's a topic worthy of debate in a ReadItTorial if anything is.

For a number of years, we've noticed that kids are naturally drawn to the 'magic' of science and experimenting, they love building their own stuff and coming up with their own crazy inventions, they seem to have a natural affinity for technology, programming and showing 'us old folk' how it should be done when it comes to technology, and it goes without saying that even though she's a quarter of my age, C will always outstrip me when it comes to sheer ability in maths.

But what of art?  We've blogged extensively on various topics surrounding the arts, and the reluctance of schools to give as much focus to art as they do to the core STEM subjects.

I started to think about the various ways that art finds its way into those other STEM subjects. Many Mathematicians describe "the beauty of mathematics" and can talk for ages about how one particular set of formulae or a complex algorithm can almost be aesthetically beautiful, in fact a work of art.

Moving into the sciences, even if you're studying the natural forms around us there is art there, beauty there that can inspire fantastic designs. In fact where my wife works (in Engineering Science), many of the materials specialists study are derived from natural objects. In order to make new and exciting human-made products to serve a particular purpose, structures as complex as a butterfly's wing can often be the key to unlocking something that could revolutionise a particular use case.

Turning to Engineering, I remember a quote from Jonathan Ives (the man who makes all your Apple equipment 'sexy' and has designed some of Apple's key products, revolutionising the way we think about consumer electronics).

"It is sad that so many designers don't know how to make. CAD software can make a bad design look palatable! It is sad that four years can be spent on a 3D design course without making anything! People who are great at designing and making have a great advantage."

We fall in love with new technology easily, but forget that the fundamentals of art and design are still a requirement. Being able to visualise something, imagine something is the first step in bringing that product to life, perhaps even to market (again consider another famous designer's placing of art and design skills as being equally as important as science, maths and tech - one James Dyson). 

Schools could be doing our kids a huge injustice by closing off art subjects to them, and a lot of that seems to stem (see what I did there) from a misunderstanding of how art and design have so many inroads into, and are so impactive on other career choices. "Mucking about with crayons" seems to be the baseline opinion of artistic endeavours, and it's not hard to see why most kids drift away from creative subjects (or are put off them for life with a lacklustre curriculum). 

If schools are throwing in the towel because they feel that somehow art is less important than literacy, numeracy, what makes us more uniquely human, more possessing of a soul (if such a thing exists) will ultimately be lost. Children can gain confidence through creative subjects, and have the capacity to soak up creative-based learning and then themselves learn to create, to doodle, sing, compose, draw, write creatively and convey their ideas to others in extremely powerful ways. 

As with most things, putting in a little extra effort at home will always be the way to get kids genuinely interested in creative subjects in their own right. Always making art materials available to them (and decent quality materials at that, not just cheap stuff from Poundland) and perhaps even seeing their parents doodling, sewing, making and painting themselves will definitely encourage children to become more involved and interested in those subjects.

We're currently trying to build a portfolio of work for C, so that she may have a chance of benefitting from an arts scholarship and it's a very exciting prospect, but also a mind-crushingly frustrating one when we try to shoehorn art projects into her fairly harsh homework timetable. We manage to do quite a bit at weekends but it really does feel like once again, particularly with homework, priority is always given to literacy and maths above all else.

So what can be done? Can creatives perhaps become ambassadors to schools in the same way other STEM ambassadors have in recent years? It would certainly make a colossal difference to kids to see folk who have chosen the arts as their career coming into schools to show their work, show how they make a living and what a difference their work makes to the world.