Let’s go for Steam, not Stem
IT WAS with real sadness that I read a letter in The Star last week. In discussing lottery funding, this reader states: “Until there are no charities closing down due to lack of funds, no glaring problems at state hospitals and no dearth of sanctuary for the elderly, Cosatu, the National Youth Development Agency, sport and the arts can compete for the crumbs.”
In the book Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class, by Scott Timberg (Yale), the author describes a world where bespoke music and “record” stores draw the blinds and lock their doors for the last time.
He describes arts journalists moving home, as they are no longer able to pay the bond. He describes a “general attitude of indifference” towards the arts and culture; he describes the humanities and the arts as being under siege for a variety of reasons.
Timberg quotes essayist Richard Rodriguez: “When a newspaper dies in America, it is not simply that a commercial enterprise has failed; a sense of place has failed.”
We need to stop thinking of the arts and sport as exclusionary to other important needs in society. Like science and technology, arts and sport are important to the health of a society. There is research from the Ford Foundation that states explicitly that only with the inclusion of arts and sport can a child’s education and development be considered “whole”.
The current deliberations on transformative economies describe what Daniel Goleman calls an “emotional economy”, Seth Godin calls a “connective economy”, and Richard Florida calls the “great reset”.
Soft skills
Goleman talks of a historical precedence where IQ was valued as greater than EQ, but he argues that we have moved into a paradigm where “soft skills” – resilience, innovation, creativity, emotional agility and social capital – need to be valued. “The rules for work are changing. The new measure… focuses instead on personal qualities, such as initiative and empathy, adaptability and persuasiveness.”
Professor Giovanni Schiuma, director of the Innovations Insights Hub at the London School of the Arts, who presented the keynote address at the Business and Arts South Africa (Basa) Arts in Business Forum at the Gordon Institute of Business Science in Joburg, argued that it was through arts-based initiatives that the “soft skills” could be developed and taught.
He describes the arts as a key point to other skills, saying they act as a trigger and catalyst.
The idea of the arts as key to other skills is fundamental to an argument in the US to shift Stem education (science, technology, engineering and maths), to Steam (the inclusion of the arts).
“Collaboration, trial and error, divergent thinking skills, dynamic problem solving, and perseverance are all among the skills fostered by the arts, and can be brought to bear to improve Stem learning,” says Aaron Schock in an article lobbying for arts education, and Steam engagement.
Taking the debate further, journalist Henry Doss recently argued in Forbes magazine that we should rather think about “three obvious features of the ecosystem: science, economics and arts… or Sea… based on the notion of developing the intellect for substantial expression as it help(s) to fuel ‘big thinking’ – the food of innovation”.
When our politicians continue to argue that maths and science graduates will boost economic status, I am pushed to remind them that our country’s economic and cultural status is likewise ensured through the works of authors Zakes Mda, Mandla Langa, Professor Mbulelo Mzamane, and artist William Kentridge.
I was relieved when I heard Professor Malegapuru Makgoba, then vice-chancellor of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, a man of the sciences, arguing on talk radio for greater support of the humanities.