ITI Articles

by Jonathan Milne

‘The arts and sciences are part of one, common creative culture largely composed of polymathic individuals’ *

The great disaster of money-driven education is that it has moved aggressively to career-based results. In New Zealand there is an expectation that a school like The Learning Connexion will have a relationship with industry and will demonstrate career relevance. Fortunately New Zealand has developed a comfortable acceptance of the ‘creative industries’ and we have been able to meet the requirements.
 
The official word from the Department of Trade and Enterprise is worth reading (see http://www.nzte.govt.nz/section/11756.aspx) because it gives an indication of the economic significance of creativity:

The creative industries sector is identified within the Growth and Innovation Framework as one of the keys to New Zealand’s economic transformation. The sector was chosen both because of its potential for growth and its ability to enable innovation and improved productivity across other sectors within the economy. The creative industries sector currently contributes about $2.86 billion (3.1% total GDP), but the sector is growing at a faster rate than the economy as a whole, at a rate of 9%.

Creative industries is a diverse sector, which includes screen production, television, music, design, fashion, textiles and digital content. New Zealand has already established competitive advantage in some niches within the sector, notably, screen production and post production, and has a growing reputation across a number of other areas including fashion and design.

In addition to our world class capability, the creative industries can leverage New Zealand’s unique culture and as a knowledge based sector, it has the potential to generate wealth on a sustained basis and reposition New Zealand as a nation of new ideas and new thinking.

But the ‘creative industries’ are only a fraction of the story. The bigger picture is being pieced together by researchers such as Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein. The Root-Bernsteins made an ingenious study of scientists who had won Nobel Prizes in chemistry. They said: “Particularly noteworthy is the fact that Nobel Prize winners practice poetry and other forms of creative writing and the visual arts at rates many times those of average scientists … We therefore feel confident in saying that the most creative scientists not only have the psychological profiles of artists, but more often than not are artists.” (p137, Creativity: From Potential to Realization, published by the American Psychological Association, 2004).

The Root-Bernsteins go on to say (page 141): “If scientists and artists really think the same way, then it should follow that they can also benefit from insights obtained in the complementary discipline.”

The implication is that a vocationally driven curriculum is likely to short-change the very careers it is trying to support. From the TLC experience I suggest that the right sort of integration of art, science and other subjects will be especially beneficial for the individuals most likely to drive creative developments in their main field of work.

Historically the notion of a ‘rounded education’ had something going for it. What TLC is advocating is an integrated education which draws out creative processes in each subject area and encourages the interplay of different areas of knowledge.

TLC has taken art into unlikely places such as Georgia Tech, the School of Engineering at Cornell University and the Faculty of Science at Victoria University. Students’ responses have ranged from exhilaration to puzzlement. The stumbling block (so far) has been the reluctance of administrators to try an experimental programme to test whether our claims are justified. Sooner or later we’ll find willing collaborators and the evidence will gradually accumulate.

In practice our students aren’t waiting for the research – they’re coming to us from a wide variety of fields and they’re getting involved. It has all the wonderful messiness of an educational earthquake and it’s going to take a long time before we can deliver the sort of data which will persuade the sceptical academics.

The important point is that most of our students are not with us to become artists. They’re doing things to enhance their lives. For many the goal is to give some scope to their ‘right-mode’ thinking and they have a vague idea that this will be good for them. It remains to be seen how this will unfold when students leave the school although the early (and subjective) indications are highly positive.

This item is an excerpt from Jonathan Milne’s book due to be published later this year.

*‘Artistic scientists and scientific artists: the link between polymathy and creativity’, a paper which features in ‘Creativity: From Potential to Realization’ – edited by Sternberg, Grigorenko and Singer, published by the American Psychological Association 2004.