Are Artistic Subjects in Schools Still Important Despite the 'Starving Artist' Stigma?

In my opinion, yes they are. And to be honest I really don't know why some school districts are actually defunding them. It's common knowledge (according to the quote by Phylicia Rashad) that before a child learns to talk, they sing, and before they learn to write, they paint. And as my one-year-old nephew can testify, as soon as babies stand, they dance. Art is literally the basis of human expression. And so what do you think would happen if we didn't have art in schools, and would have to drudge through all these other subjects that don't exercise the right half of the brain?

We have a bunch of robots. And depression. And the opposite of depression isn't joy in this case - it's expression. And how do you express all the emotion inside of you and whatever ideas you have?

It's through creativity.

You may not think that's the case when it comes to things like science and architecture and the like. There is some element of creativity to designing a new drug trial, some new product that could solve all of life's problems, and cars that run on something that's not gas. If we didn't have that, we'd still be riding horse-drawn carriages, living in caves and relying on fire to cook our meals. Things have evolved because of creativity. And the arts nourish that creative side of our brain so that we can use those skills to evolve things and make things better. (I remember sitting in a traffic jam on the way to school and wondering why flying cars haven't been invented yet. And I'm sure I'm not the only kid who has thought this as they worry about receiving yet another detention.)

My Story of Being an Artistic Non-Comformist

To put more context into the video above (subscribe to my channel!), picture an African-American girl whose parents decided they were called to be missionaries in a very dry but multi-ethnic country called South Africa. Also picture that same girl holding her pencil with a fist grip and continuing to do so despite every teacher (even a random librarian) basically wanting to whack her hand with a ruler like it's 1950. Also picture that girl living in a haze of colors and fantasies even seven years after the move, where this story takes place.

When you're about to enter 10th grade in South Africa, in addition to the required subjects (English, Math, a language and Life Orientation which is basically equivalent to health class), you choose three of your own. And the year we were supposed to choose our subjects was also coincidentally the year last year’s matrics (12th graders) had a pass rate that was less than 100%. Which usually wouldn’t matter if this was a school out in some burb near the bush somewhere, but this was one of the top girls’ schools in the country. And the principal prided herself on her 100% matric pass rates during the fifteen or so years she’d been principal at the time. Probably because we were also the top feeder school for the South African equivalents of some of the oldest and best state universities in America. So of course we had to make her look good. And so God help this one lone wolf who dared actually fail twelfth grade by failing two subjects.

How ironic is this picture? It's definitely true but the opposite is drilled into our heads.

And unlike in America, if you fail your last year of high school, that’s all she wrote. You can’t repeat the year, and so that then obliterates your chances of getting into college at all. Three years of seven (or probably more) subjects culminated in brain-destroying preliminary exams and national finals that would ultimately determine your major in college and what degree you were allowed to pursue. Or, if you didn’t pass them, they would sentence you to a fate similar to the people selling newspapers on a street corner, apparently. All the ninth-graders and their parents were congregated in the auditorium, grimacing at each other as they listened to the principal lambast this poor girl for an hour. She was failing math and physics at the time, and instead of dropping down to Mathematical Literacy or switching out of physics, chose to continue to slog through them despite many warnings.

You can’t fully blame the girl though. Her parents had as much stake in her decision to press on as she did. The academic culture generally when you’re just leaving high school is to study the subjects that will get you into supposedly high-paying degree programs such as medicine, accounting, law, engineering. Only in South Africa it’s like a giant anvil you’re forced to carry like a weight on your shoulders, where you have to not only pick wisely, but also get the grades that will translate into the points you need to enter a degree program. Mathematical Literacy (an alternative form of regular math that doesn’t include much beyond what’s already covered in ninth grade), which the school suggested our token failure take, would not open many doors career-wise. And you would need physics to get into anything sciency.

My own parents didn’t care what subjects I chose as long as I liked them. Like someone who had to ten seconds to detonate a bomb by cutting the right wire, I selected art, history and biology, all subjects I got good enough grades in. But that was before I turned into Marie Kondo for a second and asked myself what kind of subjects would give me joy. So I changed it to art, drama and bio.

Such a combination would give a guidance counselor a heart attack, I’m sure. Several people in my grade who had the same idea were told they weren't allowed to take two artistic subjects.

That is, until I effectively gave the timetable coordinator the middle finger when I marched into her office one recess telling her to change my subjects.

“Art, drama and bio?” she said incredulously.

“Yeah.”

“That doesn’t look like a good combination to me. I mean, what do you want to do after school?”

“Um, I wanna be an artsy person?” I frankly could have worded it better, but heaven almighty in a hand basket, I was fifteen, okay?! I didn’t even know what I wanted for breakfast tomorrow let alone for my whole darned career.

She gives me a look. “Okay, I’ll change them for you; you can come back after break,” she sighed. “And I don’t know why I should care about your future when you clearly don’t.”

While it’s important to note that what has played out in the ten-plus years since that conversation would make me (and probably you, because you're on this website) laugh hysterically at her, it’s also important to note that my fifteen-year-old choices made a whole lot of sense back then. And I'm sure I wasn't the first person to try to take art and drama in the history the school. But I wasn't the last because I fought against the status quo: only do one art subject or the other, because you cannot possibly want to be in the arts.

You see, I am not an offspring of a family of doctors, engineers and lawyers, save for my dad being an MIT grad (who later switched gears to the humanities so he doesn't really count). Nor do I really have any interest in those subjects at all, save for the diseases section of the biology curriculum and my intermittent House binges. I was basically born with a crayon in my hand, writing stories and songs and drawing whatever came to mind in blank notebooks for hours.

I probably was a bohemian/hippie/whatever before I knew what those words meant lol!

And don’t get me started on this befuddling thing called math that was basically worshipped to the point where if you failed in it, you failed the whole darned year. Somehow I was nominated for AP Math and managed to pass despite a shoddily-written textbook full of typos and unsolvable equations that even my former engineer dad with a PhD couldn't understand, but I digress. It's the whole notion of distinctions (80% grade and above) that people really want to strive for when it comes to matric finals. I only got one, in drama, but I was very close with Art and others before the re-grade (which I didn't get because I hopped on a plane headed back to America the day after getting my final grades for what, at the time of writing this post, was the last time). So Mrs. You-Don't-Care-About-Your-Future can go shove it.

How the Arts Should Be Taught in Schools

Okay, I already explained why the arts should stay in schools. But I definitely believe we're still thinking within the box when it comes to what exactly can be created by a child.

You see, in my school days, I was getting crappy grades in art, despite my teachers sensing my obvious talent (my high school teacher even said to my parents that I was creating stuff beyond what a high school student should be able to do). I mean, I taught myself how to do full-scale drawings on that retro app AppleWorks for Pete's sake. But when you're in school, they're all about coloring within the lines and giving them what they want (if they even specify that). Which is totally stupid when it comes to art. Or creating in general. If you, the teacher, give the assignment to design a kitchen (an actual assignment I got in Technology class which involved some art), open your stupidly narrow mind enough to a student who hands in a design with an S-shaped countertop inspired by actual (pre-AI) pictures on Google. Get out to some part of the world that doesn't have rows and rows of desks full of parrot students.

9-year-old me drew this, a notable family favorite. I can't find a picture of the kitchen design with the S-shaped countertop but will share on socials once I do so you can laugh along with me. And if you're reading this, Miss R, switching from teaching to a corporate career right before the end of the semester was a smart move since I had to get a regrade from another teacher. Go look up "S-shaped kitchen counters" on Google and then thank your lucky stars you didn't stay my teacher.

High school art and drama in my case were filled with a lot of history. I think we covered paintings just about every historical period like Surrealism, Neo-Classicism, Fascism and other genres with more naked women and penises than I care to admit. And with drama it was of sex and Dionysian festivals (Lysistrata, anyone?), Chekhov, some prominent movement guys, Absurdism, and a whole lot of existentialism. I'm surprised I didn't run away from home to find some hippie commune after learning about the meaninglessness of human existence. But with the way we're conditioned to parrot back stuff in school and then go to college just to be trapped in a holding pattern for forty hours a week until we die, Sartre and Camus are kind of on to something.

I can't speak much to the American way of teaching art or drama, since I wasn't brought up with that. And my school(s) didn't really offer music (until college, the only vocal training I got was in choir). But I will say that one thing South African schools require in the drama curriculum that America probably doesn't is heavily studying the work of political theatre, which in this case, came out of Apartheid. And for our matric final, at least one of our performance pieces had to be South African. Kind of hard to do when just about every library in a ten-mile radius has basically zero South African plays (thank you, Cultural Boycott, and the fact that libraries are badly underfunded there). And to make matters a lot more interesting, characters are going to have specific races in Apartheid-era plays; that's just the way it is if you're protesting (or not). And this straight-laced German woman who is your teacher is going to make sure the characters you pick fit the race you already are. And so how exactly do you find plays that have black characters for a class that is majority black?

You do what I did: find a loophole to use Tolkien (South African, in case you didn't know) and perform a scene from The Hobbit. And then you do whatever scenes for everything else.

Being black and not South African was already hard because I had this weird accent, very educated parents and was definitely more outspoken than most. But it being a limiting factor in what pieces I could pick was more of a nuisance than anything since I for some reason was always paired with other black students and there were very few pieces with two black characters. (I also could pass for coloured apparently; I'll write a post on an incident involving my so-called racial ambiguity another time. Similar to what my brother and some of my classmates dealt with, the stereotypes towards black children in South Africa [similar to America] are that they’re troublemakers and aren’t going to try hard enough in school, like their parents who were forced to slog through Afrikaans-medium schooling during the apartheid era. And so, sometimes they don't. Not always the case though, but my school definitely perpetuated this.)

I get that you have political art, but when you're teaching, keep your stereotypes and ideals out of the classroom. A student doesn't know anything different about the way they talk or dance or even the fact that they don't have blue eyes until someone points it out. And if you do cover history, for the love of Pete, don't reenact the racist bits (actual thing I dealt with covering MLK in kindergarten of all places. The white teacher asked the only other white student what they would do during that time frame and of course the kid said he'd meet his Asian friend [made sense at the time since neither look like MLK]. See? Kids don't see race).

Apologizing for all the side tangents, I encourage anyone reading this post to share this with a teacher. Let your kids think outside of the box. You know they will because it hasn't been beaten out of them yet. And if it has, that means you'll have a depressed robot student that will live a life like the Myth of Sisyphus if they have no means of expressing themselves without worrying about whether it's right or wrong. Because teachers are supposed to instill growth in their students. Not raise a bunch of robots.

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Stay educated,

Alexia