Breeze Perspectives: The irony of the ‘art class’
Art is dead, and education is the murderer
By Chris Parthemos, contributing writer
Posted on September 7, 2006

It’s one of the great pretentious, melodramatic declarations of the 21st century that art is dead. You’ve probably heard that before. You were probably sitting behind a desk and watching some jerk in a cardigan natter on about how art is for smart people and people just aren’t as smart as they used to be. I’ve heard that enough times from enough people to make a casual assumption that a lot of the kind of people I would generally classify as “a drain on society” believe the very same. Well, I’ll tell you right now that it’s all a load of crap; art is dead, or at least very sick, but it’s not because “people aren’t smart enough anymore” or any such thing. It’s because inspiration is no longer an educational priority.

Allow me to elaborate. We have an education system that shares as much knowledge as possible with as many people as possible, and that is for the best, to be sure. However, an unfortunate side effect of any efficiency is a numbing of the spirit. This by itself isn’t necessarily a problem; a military organization can be at once efficient and spirited if both are listed as priorities. The problem with our education system is that the spirit, and most importantly the creative spirit, is not a priority. Class is about learning material and getting grades — no matter how hard some teachers may try to avoid it — and as long as there are grades to be given, they will be the priority. Because of the importance of having the right answers and thus being at a high enough grade level to get in college/stay in college/get in your major/get in to grad school/get a good job, actually thinking about what’s going on becomes secondary to knowing what you “need to know.” The most egregious consequence of this priority paradigm is the basic and growing unpopularity of intellectual art. There’s simply no purpose for art anymore — it’s a distraction, it takes effort, and it probably won’t make you money until after you’re dead.

If you ask the average student who their favorite poet is, they’ll either respond with the first one they remember studying in school or they’ll flip you the finger and walk away. Trust me, I’ve tried. The simple fact of the matter is that they’d have a pretty good reason. The average student’s exposure to poetry is more like being hit in the head with the book than anything else. The achievement-driven priorities of the system force a right or a wrong answer for even something so abstract and objective as poetic interpretation or art in general. Even if you enjoy the poem, it’s demoralizing to be told exactly what it means, and more than that, it negates the purpose of reading it. By the time you’ve made it through your unit on “the existentialism of Eliot” and “the language of Langston,” you’ve lost all enthusiasm for it. All you need to know is that you’ll get an A if you talk about how “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each/I do not think they will sing to me” is the most depressingly beautiful moment in poetic literary history. Why dig deeper?

It seems ironic to assert that education is destroying a fundamental element of our culture and society — after all, education is the pillar that holds society up, the electric energy that fuels our civilization. However, we’ve gotten so focused on running a clean, fuel-burning machine that we’ve forgotten all about the beauty of dining by candlelight. But there’s no reason to lose hope: even in a world where art is dead, there is a muse. There is always a muse.

Chris Parthemos is a freshman English major.