When I entered high school back in the old country, when “streaming based on aptitude” began, I asked my dad which of the three available streams should I enter: Science, Commerce, or Arts? Dad replied, “Well, in my time, the bright kids went into Science, the average ones into Commerce, and the duds went into Arts.” So, being a bright student who won most of the academic prizes up to that point, and because I couldn’t tell Dad that my heart was in the Arts, and break his, I chose Science. And I failed. Bigly. I never won any prizes after that. I scraped through my O’ levels and flamed out in my A’s.
I discovered that Aptitude and Attitude are different words, and both are necessary for Altitude. I may have had the aptitude to understand Pythagoras’s Theorem, Algebra, and Chemistry, but was I ever going to apply them in real life? This attitude was self-defeating. Without the ability to see the end game, effort dries up. Being in Science gave me another attitude, however, a high and mighty one, from which I looked down upon those poor sucks in Commerce and Arts as less than equals. Talk of Entitlement! This streaming really screwed me up.
On the other hand, had I studied Accounting, Economics, Business Strategy, Project Management and other Commerce subjects at an earlier stage than when I eventually did, I would have risen the corporate ladder at a much younger age, even if it was only to earn a buck and plough it back on my real passion, i.e., the Arts—theatre, music, and literature—stuff reserved only for the “duds.”
Dad was right, however, you couldn’t make any serious money in the Arts back then, not now, not ever, not unless you were a “chosen one” snatched up by the zeitgeist once in a blue moon, like a Bernhardt, a Beethoven, or a Rowling. Perhaps that’s why the duds were dumped there. The Arts are relegated to hobbies in our materialistic society, something to be indulged in only with spare time and money, sometimes with the support of a benevolent sponsor; it has become a place to consign misfits who do not know how to buy and sell things we don’t need, or invent a vaccine, or design a robot. Do they not understand that for a society to say it is “developed,” requires it to also have a thriving arts sector?
Now that I am older, and hopefully wiser, having quit Science after my hopeless A’ levels, and ditched Commerce after retiring from a modest business career, I have had the time to embrace Arts unashamedly and figure out whether it’s only for duds like me. My findings differ from the thinking of Dad’s generation.
Armed with these findings, when a TV interviewer asked me recently, “So why are the Arts important to you?” I replied, “It provides balance to the randomness of life and rearranges our experiences to provide coherence.” Let me clarify: a novel has a beginning, middle, and end, in that sequence, whereas in life the end may be the beginning or the middle, and there are long periods of meaninglessness in the crevices. Art extracts and displays the beauty of life while also showing its unvarnished ugliness and cruelty without apology. Art gives flight to our imagination by creating fictional worlds or re-designing our existing one. Art holds the mirror to our faces and says, “This is your life. Suck it up, buddy.” How does one value this humbling experience that enriches the soul but not the pocketbook? Monetary valuation will fail unless the world confers mass demand upon the artist’s work, or if the work becomes precious and is not reproducible when its creator dies.
Art is valuable to its practitioners who toil day after day for an idea or an ideal. This effort sometimes produces work of staggering genius that stuns those who remain in the wings or the audience. The pursuit of art can lead to inflated and unwarranted wealth (ask Rowling!) or to frustration, failure, poverty, and suicide (ask Van Gogh). This dedication to an elusive cause must come from an innate human need that responds to the Jesus-like call, “Give it all up and follow me, to wherever it leads.”
If I have another life and am given the task of rearranging the streaming of students based on aptitude, I would categorize those streams differently: Science, for those who like to experiment with and extrapolate factual data, and live on institutional largesse; Commerce, for those who wish to exploit the tried and true (including proven scientific discoveries and acknowledged works of art); Art, for those wanting to capture the meaning and explore the essence of life. And there will be bright ones, average ones, and duds in all three streams. If this is the normal bell-curve distribution of society, why should the classroom be different?
And I’d advise those who rush headlong in our developed society to pause and absorb what art has to offer—support it, nurture it, and benefit from it. Art may offer meaning to life and a detour from the headlong rat race to the cliff and into extinction.
