Innovation, Liberal Arts, and Flexible Thinking
by Mike Davis, Ph.D.
Head of School
Head of School
At Colorado Academy, we are focused on helping students learn to think critically. We know that developing this skill is essential to prepare students for their lives beyond the classroom. One of the ways we do that is to offer a strong experiential program. We celebrate "hands-on learning." We also celebrate providing a broad liberal arts and sciences program that encourages students to see relationships across disciplines. Making these cross-disciplinary connections helps students learn to approach and solve complex problems.
I was intrigued by an article a parent sent me this week from the Washington Post titled, "Why we Don't Need more STEM Majors, We Need More STEM Majors with Liberal Arts Training." As a humanities and history teacher who loves technology and science, I enjoyed this piece. It's worth reading it its entirety. http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/02/18/we-dont-need-more-stem-majors-we-need-more-stem-majors-with-liberal-arts-training/?tid=sm_f
One key quote stands out: "Our culture has drawn an artificial line between art and science, one that did not exist for innovators like Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs. Leonardo’s curiosity and passion for painting, writing, engineering and biology helped him triumph in both art and science; his study of anatomy and dissections of corpses enabled his incredible drawings of the human figure. When introducing the iPad 2, Jobs, who dropped out of college but continued to audit calligraphy classes, declared: 'It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.'”
With a number of national education initiatives and our culture's current fear of staying competitive globally, the liberal arts and humanities have been pushed aside. Students are encouraged to drop humanities courses and instead focus on becoming engineers. We certainly have done more to develop STEM learning at CA, but we have deliberately tried to connect it to the arts and humanities. We use the term “STEAM” and offer interdisciplinary courses that combine engineering and design. Further, we want our future engineers to study poetry, just as we want our future linguists to understand physics. There is so much evidence about the value of a liberal arts education offers enormous benefit and translates in so many ways. An August 2014 Fast Company article titled, "Why Top CEOs Want Employees with Liberal Arts Degrees" offers many examples (including Steve Jobs) of leaders in the tech industry who have liberal arts degrees. http://www.fastcompany.com/3034947/the-future-of-work/why-top-tech-ceos-want-employees-with-liberal-arts-degrees
One tech leader is quoted as saying that her liberal arts degree "sets her apart from her technically trade colleagues." A liberal arts education allows for students to see the world from multiple perspectives and better grapple with the complexity of issues. This leader is Danielle Sheer, a VP at Carbonite, who argues, "I don’t believe there is one answer for anything. That makes me a very unusual member of the team. I always consider a plethora of different options and outcomes in every situation."
The Fast Company article notes that the incredible rate of technological change is another reason why students should try focus more on learning how to think rather than focusing on narrow technical training. The article quotes Georgia Nugent, former president of Kenyon College, an outstanding liberal arts school in Ohio: "It’s a horrible irony that at the very moment the world has become more complex, we’re encouraging our young people to be highly specialized in one task. We are doing a disservice to young people by telling them that life is a straight path. The liberal arts are still relevant because they prepare students to be flexible and adaptable to changing circumstances."
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