I suppose it is not reasonable to speculate on the limits of human creativity. But one thing is certain. We all have an initial capacity for creative expression, if only in one way and not another. For some, it is crushed by their earliest experiences of life-conditions that I would not wish on anyone. For others, their creative capacities have been stimulated and enabled from the very start.
Sometimes, those whose creative capacities have been encouraged, come together. And that just amplifies everyone’s creativity. This week I experienced a rather refined expression of cooperative creativity in the form of a high school theatrical production. But that does not happen just anywhere.
Not Just Any Academy
I had the honor of teaching university classes, including graduate seminars, to a wide range of students in an urban university setting for about thirty-five years. I have known many very smart and creative students and some not so smart. But what bothered me most in all those years was the fact that far too many very bright students I worked with at the university, were terribly ill-prepared. They were very motivated, but their creativity was stifled by the education system from which they came.
What is a very bright but woefully unprepared student? Well, in many cases I experienced, the person was a victim of the Los Angeles Unified School District, or of some other urban primary and secondary schools such as those in Compton. What went on in those institutions was a far cry from what the students of Sonoma Academy experience. That is where I observed one of the most sophisticated theatrical productions I might have imagined coming out of a Broadway theater. The choreography alone was amazing in its complexity and coordination. Never mind the star-quality of the lead player or the stellar performances of many others.
To say that Sonoma Academy is well-funded would be a major understatement. Sonoma County, of course, is one of the wealthiest areas in Northern California, if not the state or nation; I have not looked that up. The point here is that it takes money as well as talent and determination to produce a high school play that is of professional quality.
Of course, there is much more to it than that. The students at Sonoma Academy have had some of the best primary educational experiences available in the nation. Now, we don’t want to sound too snobbish here; there are many—though far too few—public schools that exude high quality education. But plenty of funding has always been there for the education of the children of the rich. Too many elitist politicians do not think that ‘we’ can ‘afford’ public education–that is, education for the rest of us–while their neo-liberal economic ideology urges them to provide mega-corporations and the super-rich with more tax cuts, loop-holes, and subsidies, while squeezing ethnic minorities, poor folks, and even the shrinking middle class, into boxes of minimized opportunity.
Some public schools specialize in math and science, others the arts and humanities as does Sonoma Academy. But the bottom line here is that quality education takes money, even if only because the very best teachers can command better pay than the more poorly funded school systems can pay, and even more important, they want to teach in a creative educational environment.
This past few days, I was able to experience the convergence of just the right mix of talent, organization, and resources—including a new $35-million theater with all the latest technology—to result in a stunningly sophisticated musical theater production that could not have happened without that happy convergence. I could not look back without imagining how many teenagers in America will never have a chance to have such an experience—not just in theater, but in any other field—in the American system of education, which is often a mere afterthought of the industrial-consumer political economy. Frankly, neither our consumer culture nor financial/political elites give a damn about education, except for their own progeny.
Excellence is a Societal Choice
In writing this, I am reminded of some characteristics of the education system in Finland. Some striking contrasts with American educational culture come to mind. Until the 1970s, if I remember correctly, Finnish education was not much different from that in the U.S. But the Finns made a conscious societal decision to build the strongest education system they could, because they valued their children’s future.
Well, today the results are quite astounding. Teachers are highly respected and very well paid. Students have no homework; the process while they are in school is quite effective, in that everyone is engaged and learning. Oh, and students from Finland have the highest scores on international tests.
What could possibly be going on?
Looking Forward: Development or Decay
Frankly, the so-called “American Exceptionalism” is a fantasy built on a lie. The dominance of economism and technophilia, built on a history of racist empire building by exploiting much of the rest of the world, have pretty much driven out human values as the basis of the culture. That is why greed and indifference to evil so predominate in public policy and political practice.
Maybe we will somehow wake up, as the Finns did, maybe not. But if we as a nation cannot even recognize some of the most obvious existential threat of the downward trends in our physical environment—climate chaos and ecological destruction—then how are we to re-configure our culture to be driven by the most valuable asset we have, the creativity and compassion of our people?
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 