The Importance of Art Education | StarTalk

There's a big issue, uh, probably in other places in the world, but we feel it a lot here in the States. The funding for Arts education is always under stress, and the school boards are wondering: Do we cut the art? Do we keep the science? And there's tension. We know this, and I brought that up with David Byrne, and he had strong views on that as well.

Let's check it out. In order to really succeed in whatever math and the sciences and engineering like that, you have to be able to think outside of the box, and you have to be creative problem-solving. The way those disciplines are taught is not totally creative. The creative thinking? Not at all. Not at all. It’s more like this is this, this is this, this is this.

The creative thinking is in the arts. A certain amount of arts education doesn't mean that your ambition is to grow up to be a painter, but you can use that kind of thinking and apply it to anything else: business, engineering, science, and be better at it. And you're better at that, you succeed more, and you bring more to the world because you have these abilities that came from outside of your discipline.

So, bringing different worlds together has definite tangible benefits, and to kind of cut one or separate them is to injure them and, and them. You know, I basically agreed with everything he said in these interviews. I mean, I just—he's a deep thinker, he's creative, he's educated, and so his thoughts are put together in ways that really resonated with me.

When I think of culture, what do I think of? I think if you visit other countries and then they show you what it is that makes them them and not you, and in almost every case you do this, you are looking at their art, you are looking at their architecture, you are looking at aspects of their civilization that has been empowered by science and engineering.

And so for anyone to say, "Let us cut art for anything else," suppose they did that back in Renaissance Europe. Well, what would Europe be without the support and interest in a thriving culture of art? As we readily spend money to visit these cities and go to their museums, to turn around and say, "Now I'm going to cut the art budget here," that makes no sense to me.

And it may be that science and art, which we know sort of go together—the arts and sciences are colleges of institutions. It may be that art and science, thought of in that way, are the only true things that we create that last beyond ourselves. Everything else comes and goes: the leaders, the politics, the economies.

So, am I biased? I don’t know. What I do know is: if there is a country without art, that's not a country I want to live in. If there's a country without science, you're living in a cave. We measure the success of a civilization by how well they treat their creative people.