A Break for the Artist

It takes a while for us to really grasp what's going on with our own interests and where we want to take them in the future. The classic "what do you want to be when you grow up?" is unfair to ask to students of a range of ages just because they're liable to change their answers in the next 2 minutes... but it's also because we may not be giving them the opportunity to figure that out themselves.

I can personally trace the places from where I draw my own opinions about things in general; my parents, the internet and literature, and my teachers. We often forget the latter. Up to a certain point, we spend all our time with our parents- but after we hit those school years, we spend about one third of our time in school during the week and a ridiculously close fraction of the rest of our time doing homework for those classes. More and more, our schooling pervades our worldview and everything we see is through that lens. Education really IS everything- you can see why what we teach is heavily influential on how our students grow and look to pursue their dreams.

Now personally, my schooling experience has been among the best in my state and in the nation as a whole. Lucky are those who live in areas where parent involvement is prevalent and education is a major priority- we get exposed to a lot just with our learning process. But the issue is that our goals, and the goals of America in general, have become a bit skewed in general. We're searching desperately for a way to lessen the STEM gap between us and our overachieving neighbors and counterparts in high-performing nations like Singapore and China. In a way, that's influenced a great deal of our STEM-heavy programming and has pushed almost all of us, regardless of economic status, to varying degrees, to do at least something about it. You can talk to underprivileged schools- they're very aware of the changes that need to be instituted at their schools, but the resources are simply not there.

And this whole awareness business is fantastic- we have a lot of students who are really responding well to our revamped curricula and programs. But the problem was and is that I and many of my friends and acquaintances and students are also artists. Sure, it was a thrill to get so much importance placed on biology (which is my second great love), but I was without relief in my search for direction as an artist and a writer. Television discounted us and our majors as useless and made a mockery of our careers shacked up in a dark room clacking away at "ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY". Media says that we can be famous if we pay the right people and have the right connections to make it big in the business. And worst of all, we have no positive reinforcement of our interests at school unless we opt to take specific classes for art.

And so it's a culture thing. We expect that the world should turn around and look at its art majors, rethink their contributions to the world and report back to us with more optimistic news. But we also know that it's much more difficult to make change happen in the macrocosm of all other world ails and issues to deal with. Unfortunately, arts are not our first guess at the solution to world hunger and violence. So for my fellow artists, this means above anything else that we must be a step ahead of the game. The research and locating of the wide range of arts careers and directions is up to us for the time being, and our role now is to realize ourselves and make efforts to help others realize this. It's self-education. Ideally, it shouldn't be like this, but it is.

As far as our education goes, we have two great advantages at our disposal: one, we are creative, and two, we know what the issues are because we carry them with us from class to class. And especially for those of us in high school, contemplating our futures, it is important that we enter this effort now to help ourselves in the future. FIND SOLUTIONS. ACTIVELY SEEK ANSWERS AND USE YOUR CREATIVITY TO BE THE CHANGE YOU WISH TO SEE. From personal experience, I can tell you that solutions are the way we can get a voice in our education- and as a teacher I can also tell you that arts education, once taught, can spread like wildfire. STEAM ahead.