Evelyn C. McDonald
Arts & Culture Reporter
December 17, 2015 4:15 p.m.
Sometimes a couple of ideas collide in your mind in a way that makes you think. A few months ago, I went to a piano recital at St. Peter’s given by the daughter of a friend of mine. It was a lovely recital – music accessible, pianist accomplished. It made me think of how lucky we are that someone cared enough to create the music and someone else cared enough to perform it for us.
As I was thinking about the recital the next day, a second idea bumped into my mind. The previous week I was talking to someone who mentioned that the State of Georgia was eliminating art and music from the public school curriculum. This trend is not new to Georgia. The reasons given usually involve budgets. Some states say that they can’t afford to provide music and art, and argue that students can do those subjects on their own. And some say we need to spend the money on STEM. For those of you who have not heard the term, STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. It is being described as essential, among other things, to finding a job and becoming a tax-paying citizen.
Lest you think I’m just a liberal arts major griping about something I don’t know, let me say that I have spent my entire work life in the T portion of STEM. My experience has ranged from writing computer code to designing information processes. So I think I have some street cred here.
It’s not that I think STEM is of no value. Far from it, technology has been a great career for me. I’m just sad to think that any government entity thinks STEM is all it takes to get along in this world. In some respects our educational system seems to have shifted from teaching us how to think to teaching us how to get a job.
I think that art and music are integral to us as humans. My mother spent the last few years of her life in a nursing home. Visiting her there, I often saw musicians who came to entertain the residents. Even residents who could barely string two words together reacted with pleasure to the music. They might not remember who they were but songs came back to them. We begin our lives with music and verse – lullabies, nursery rhymes. And it appears that music is the last light to go out.
STEM teaches us what it means to be a body in the world. Art and music teaches us what it means to be human. I submit that both lessons are important.
Evelyn McDonald moved to Fernandina Beach from the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. in 2006. She is a chair of Arts & Culture Nassau, a city commission charged with support of the arts in Nassau County. She serves on FSCJ’s Curriculum Committee for the Center for Lifelong Learning. She is also the chair of the Dean’s Council for the Carpenter Library at the UNF. Ms. McDonald has MS in Technology Management from the University of Maryland’s University College and a BA in Spanish from the University of Michigan.
Thanks! As a society, we often are too quick to decide on one, narrow path. Yes, some things are good for us, like spinach and beets, but a diet of only those items would quickly leave us malnourished. An education that requires students to consume only, or even mostly, STEM classses creates malnourished brains. Music and mathemathics have a long known relationship; language skills are essential for scientists to communicate the importance of their findings; engineers need to understand human behavior. Each person has unique potentials; if we don’t open doors for all studenst to see the vaste array of possibilities, we may fail to awaken a potential Mozart or a Shakespeare. Our world needs young people who have the educational background to live life to its fullest and to see the complexities of our existence,
Excellent entry. It helps to have someone who has had a career in technology makes these points.