Posted by
Waski_the_Squirrel on Sunday, July 27, 2008 11:41:02 PM
Stop looking at school as vocational training! As I mentioned before in parts
1 and
2, to look at school from a purely vocational viewpoint is to lose out on important skills.
Physics is one of those great courses that teaches about reading graphs, looking for patterns, mathematical thinking, and provides a good basis for concepts in the other sciences. It's a good course for understanding things. It's a great thinking course. (That's where I was headed with my last entry...though I got sort of wrapped up in roundabouts.)
The arts have gotten short shrift so far. That's a lack of familiarity on my part. However, one of the important skills in our world is creativity. Richard Feynman used creativity to come up with the explanation for the Challenger accident. Einstein broke out of the mechanical model in Physics with creativity. Remember, creativity is originality.
What the arts do is provide an outlet for creativity. They allow "outside the box" thinking. When Richard Feynman decided that the rubber o-rings got too cold, that was WAY outside the box. There are a lot of people out there who are not willing to think outside of the box (I didn't say not capable). This is a lack of confidence or laziness. Art and music help develop the confidence. (They won't cure laziness.)
Believe it or not, I can draw...badly, but I can do it. I can do photography, I can retouch pictures, and I can create passable results. I write science fiction as a hobby. It's not real good, but I don't care. I even blog (to my audience of 3). These things are all examples that someone like me can be creative, despite a lack of talent. Too many of us avoid creativity or outside the box thinking because of a lack of talent, or perceived lack of talent.
Take that art and music so that you can create despite a lack of talent. (Or, better still, discover a talent you never knew you had.)