P0900-S03-00126.tif
* NOTE: This article appears in the 2019 Private School Handbook.
Tell me the first sentence you diagrammed, the first column of numbers you tallied to a sum. Tell me how you first penciled the first letter to your first name and it was actually legible. Or the first time you managed to make all of the X’s and Y’s in an algebra problem click together. You probably can’t. But you’re glad you did, glad you can balance your checkbook, sign paperwork, solve problems. There’s no doubt that these kids remember the week they came to school and built a horse. All of the circles they darkened with a No. 2 pencil might have influenced their futures in a more measurable way, but building an animal from scratch couldn’t be anything but a synapse-changing exercise, even if there’s no way to quantify it. This is 1992, a decade after arts education began its freefall in the U.S., thanks to shrinking budgets and a push for more standardized curricula. What good is a papier-mâché horse if you can’t ride it to the bank? Or experiment on it to cure a deadly disease? Or teach it to add and subtract, like Mr. Ed? Or enlist it as a golf caddy when you’re out on the links? There’s no vowel in STEM that will shelter an imaginary horse, and if it’s a wild one, it might not even fit inside the A in STEAM. In a country where thousands of schools don’t even teach art anymore, a study published this past February laid out what we’ve lost: superior writing skills, focus and good behavior, more empathy. And most important: the knowledge and power to use that No. 2 pencil in 100 different ways—to darken a circle on a test, to scratch out a solution to a math problem, to draft a sonnet, or to draw a diagram for any animal you set your mind to build.
