Imagination is just as important as knowledge

At the top of the education recipe for progress is creativity.

Creativity has always been important but never in the history of humankind has it been more important than in this era of exponential change.

This era has been called several things: the age of knowledge, the knowledge economy, the information age and the high tech age and⁄or economy; it is all these things and more. I would like to add the age of creativity, an age when creativity matters more than at any other time in human history.

Creativity can be studied and taught. This is the primary purpose, goal and importance of art education. The quote from [physicist Albert] Einstein, I believe, that ‘‘imagination is just as important as knowledge” has never been more apt.

Imagination is simply the unique human ability to create images in the brain, a giant step on the evolutionary road to becoming human.

I do not detect a general understanding that scientists, poets, mathematicians, painters, writers, musicians and other artists use the same imagining⁄creative faculties.

In undergrad, an anthropology teacher assigned the book, ‘‘The two cultures and the scientific revolution,” by C.P. Snow, a British physicist. The gulf between mathematicians and scientists and artists, social scientists — the real hard sciences by the way — was growing and could not be tolerated in a world becoming exponentially more complicated.

I did not really understand why the book was assigned until I watched the PBS series, ‘‘The Ascent of Man,” with Jacob Bronowski, an Oxford professor of physics. Since then I have a re-read it several times. It was a seminal work.

Snow’s book, first published in 1959, has become a primer for all who wish to understand the challenge and, in the words of one scientist, understand that science is poetry and poetry is science. Science and poetry serving as metaphors for math, the physical and natural sciences on the one hand and the social sciences and art on the other. I recommend it to readers.

Snow writes: ‘‘I believe the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups. ... Literary intellectuals at one pole – at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension – sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other.”

This is what art educators and artists have been saying for years but much of the general public does not seem to understand. Art is the first to be cut and is seldom to my knowledge taught across the curriculum inculcating an understanding that creativity in art, science and other areas requires the same faculties, same process and come from the same area of the brain.

Art has never been a luxury, especially in this era. Elevating art to its proper place and teaching art across the curriculum require that we embrace the ideal of the Renaissance man⁄woman changing the modern paradigm, in the words of Snow, of what it means to be educated.

This ideal died with the growth of knowledge. But it is still a worthy goal.

The Renaissance man epitomized in Francis Bacon made all knowledge their province. The educated person of his era did not see science and art as unrelated disciplines but at least complementary and at best a seamless web and ways of knowing.

We must return to this ideal with instruction beginning at birth, if not in the womb, through post doctorate and other avenues of formal and informal education.

I urge the school board to fund and implement a curriculum that teaches art⁄creativity, infusing it in every subject beginning in pre-school. Science and math is poetry, and poetry is science and math.

Van Caldwell, a lawyer, lives in Kettering. He can be e-mailed at wvcaldwell@comcast.net.