Art and Culture. So What?

The learning of the Arts and Cultures has been given more prominence recently when the Minister of Education encouraged teachers to “nurture in students a love for arts and culture”.  All educators know that they should expose their children to some form of Art and Culture; simply because such exposure is good.  What is so “good” about such exposure?

When children engage in painting, they are credited as being creative and expressive.  When children dress up in traditional costumes, they are termed as culturally exposed.  Both activities are not wrong, but their scopes are too narrow to fully reap what these two disciplines can illuminate.  Art education is not only about training our children to become artists.  We do not need to become artists to know how to appreciate great works.  Similarity, not only historians can benefit from the knowledge of ancient discoveries and advancements of the great Ottoman or Greek empires.

When artists create, they are expressing their ideas, motivations, feelings and sometimes, frustrations, albeit in a visual form.  When enjoying the artworks, we are not only looking at the colours and the painted images.  We are also communicating with the artist to understand another person’s point of view.  When faced with opposing views, do we have the courage to entertain the thought that people have different ideas, but the other person may not be “wrong”?  Are we then ready to provide our own responsible and justifiable perspectives?  When faced with a more "superior" opinion, do we have the humility to recognise our own limitation?

Culture helps us to navigate our own bearing and place in society.  Being aware and proud of our own sets of values and traditions give us the foundation and the identity to face challenges.  Being aware and respectful of other people’s history and culture make us less presumptuous and open to ideas and to celebrate diversity and similarities at the same time.  This broadens our outlook, allows us to better adapt to circumstances and to function more effectively and contribute maximally to society in our own unique way. 

The value that both the Arts and Cultures can bring to our children is immense. We need to approach them with more wisdom and not just seeing them as two non-exam-able subjects where minimal exposure is considered too much.    

I Do Not Like School

This week, in one of my classes, I asked a group of Primary 5s (between 10-11 years old) if they would like to stay in an economically-challenged country with no hygiene standards to speak of and no education system in place for their citizens.  Not surprisingly, a good number of the students put up their hands and said “Yes”.  When asked to explain their choice, they said they like that that country does not force their children to go to school.

To a large extend, I feel that my students, still at a young age, do not yet appreciate what it means to not have an economically vibrant country with top-class hygiene standards.  Maybe an exchange programme with another country will get them to re-think their decision.  I remembered asking the same question, albeit in a much simpler language, to a group of Kindergarten students (between 5-6 years old).  All of them said they like school.  Although these are two different groups of students, in just a matter of 4 years, the enthusiasm and excitement that I witnessed from the younger group has been extinguished as they moved on to Primary education.

Ask a child if she would like to go to an amusement park, play computer games, or simply just cycling in the park, and you get an immediate and resonating “YES”!  Why then do we not get such response when we asked them to go to school?  As educators, we often like to assume that children do not know what is good for them and the only reason why they do not like to go to school is because they are “lazy”.  No doubt there may be some truth in that, it is also very convenient for us to just push the blame onto the children and not reflect upon our own actions.

A school will not and should not function like an amusement park.  A school has a much greater responsibility to fulfill. However, is there something we can learn from an amusement park?  How can we make school a much more pleasant place that children want to go?  A school allows our children to try out something new everyday.  It allows our children to make friends and to socialise.  Does this not sound like what an amusement park is doing to attract our children?  Maybe it’s time for us to ask ourselves if we would like to exchange places with our students.  Can we blame our children if even we ourselves do not want to be where they are right now?  How then can we make it better?