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The seventh April Moon prompt is a child's drawing of a blonde-haired alien princess (or perhaps a fairy princess or a Moogle) with a magic star wand, standing atop a tombstone (maybe?) which is setting on top of something that could be a door.
Since it's a child's drawing, there's an ambiguity about what the characters and setting might be. This isn't a bug, but a feature of children drawing. Children draw from the imagination and provide details and clues that are obvious to them, but can sometimes be difficult for us to interpret, given that we are used to certain forms, lines, and shapes to mean things, whether as exact replications of what we see in nature or as stylized forms that are supposed to represent them. This can result in the thing that should not be done to young artists and creatives.
Kevin Smith tells us it costs nothing to encourage an artist, as they might turn out to be the ones that make something that becomes a favorite. Ira Glass's advice for beginners is not to get discouraged that the things they turn out at first are not going to be up to their own standards for "good enough". There's an oft-cited number that says ten thousand hours of practice is what's needed to become an expert at something, whatever it may be. That's a very long row to hoe, especially for something that's maybe a side project, a work of passion, or something being done to explore new facets of identity. To make it all the way to mastery, there's going to be a lot of encouragement needed.
So while there are worse places to go, I would say that any child that has to go through the United States public school system has a very strong chance that their creative impulses will be destroyed or severely shackled.
U.S. schools reflect the culture around them, and that culture is obsessed with quantification. Numbers define and augment reality, too the point where having numerical data makes things appear more authoritative. Paradoxically, there is very little training on how to interpret and understand numbers, which creates a situation where more people are afraid of them, and it becomes easier to bullshit someone if there are numbers involved in what you are saying. Yet quantification continues and expands, so that there are now batteries of standardized tests for students, "productivity" measures for workers, and all sorts of serious money invested in trying to find numeric and algorithmic ways of understanding people. And even more serious money in making sure schools continue to progress in their number score every year, resulting in the cutting back of things that cannot be quantized in favor of those things that can. In such an environment, the necessary encouragement for creative endeavor is absent, because there is no space for creative endeavors in the first place.
The more perverse problem with a focus on numbers is that numbers themselves are an abstraction, a thing that both The Prisoner and Magritte knew quite well. Especially that borrowed Arabic rascal, zero. There is a lot that can be done with numbers and maths, such as bringing the cosmos down to a human-understandable level, or being able to comprehend and compute extremely large quantities of things, or as handy things to use to show off patterns that appear on our lives. Numbers are not a thing unto themselves, but always, always a representation of a specific something else. Whole persons do not easily abstract into numbers - something is always left out. The same person can support more than one candidate, hold more than one idea, do more than one thing, all simultaneously. To count a person, you must first define what part of them matters to your count, even if there are other things about them that will influence whether they end up in the count or not. Whole branches of the social sciences are dedicated to trying to find new and better ways of abstracting people so as to capture more of them into the numbers, so that more of the things that people do in their contexts can be captured and analyzed, and so there are less surprises that appear.
When it comes to schooling and the quantification of students, legislatures almost universally agree that the important parts of a student are whether they can pass tests in certain subjects so that our students can be compared to other students in a global contest of who has the best test-taking students. The standardized test components usually ask students to return bytes of knowledge on questions, often multiple-choice, with a later section asking for analysis or more complex construction of sentence and grammar, along with an argument or the critique of one. There's very little in standardized testing that says "Answer this question in the written form that suits you best." I suspect that they could get some very interesting and well-expressed verse, quips, or drawings that would indicate understanding as well as or better than a five-point essay. The things that are being sought in standardized tests are things that only a certain part of the population has as strengths, and only certain others can learn well enough to get by. Unsurprisingly, one of the things that matters in those cases is whether or not the school has enough funding to be able to give each student enough attention to ensure they are learning the material. And whether the home neighborhood of the students is peaceful and wealthy enough that they can concentrate on their studies. And whether the is a cultural attitude in that area that says doing well in school is an important priority. And a whole host of other things that have nothing to do at all with the abilities and strengths of the students themselves, which the test is trying and falling to capture, so that there can be decisions made about where money goes - perversely, the most goes to the places that need it least.
In this environment, governed by those numbers, creative expression has no place. It does not teach core competencies. Music's stringent maths requirements, exposure to foreign language terms, collaboration exercises, and abstract thinking training (the annotated dots on the page themselves do not music make, after all) are unseen, because one cannot teach music that way - it can only be done by making music, which means the sound of learning is in the sound itself, rather than a quantifiable element.
You can teach form and rhyme and style for poetry and prose. You can test to make sure someone understands how it goes. But the actual creation... more often than not, we remember the things that speak to us, that take the form and make it different or
break
it at just the right time. The twist ending, the way it's done - that can't be taught or mechanized yet. Some poetry only works when set to a beat, others only when spoken. Some poetry has to be seen.
The manual arts - sculpture, painting, architecture, smithing, fabrication, and more - the techniques can be taught, the forms studied, even replicated. Without these arts we do not exist and yet these are not considered important things for learning, nor is the time set aside at school for expression of these or other things, unless the school has decided that some part of their students' lives will not be dictated by numbers.
Against all of these odds, it is a wonder that any creativity survives. Employers are mentioning that they aren't getting graduates with the ability to think and analyze and come up with those elegant solutions, in code, in design, in implementation. Without the encouragement, a child, a student, a learner looks at all the works that have already been done and says, "I will not have that skill. Why should I try to do this?" And then the creativity goes with it.
It costs nothing to encourage an artist. Nurture that ambiguity and imagination of the children around you, regardless of how fantastical you find it or how much you think there's no skill present. Remind the adults around you that taste exceeds talent at the beginning, but talent will catch up with time and practice. It's easy to give up long before the point where it starts to click.
The numbers are abstractions, even the ones that have currency symbols in front of them that, regrettably, dictate how many of us get to pursue our art full-time and who gets to use what things to create with.
It's okay if we're not sure what the drawing is. That it is there is important, the rest are details.
Since it's a child's drawing, there's an ambiguity about what the characters and setting might be. This isn't a bug, but a feature of children drawing. Children draw from the imagination and provide details and clues that are obvious to them, but can sometimes be difficult for us to interpret, given that we are used to certain forms, lines, and shapes to mean things, whether as exact replications of what we see in nature or as stylized forms that are supposed to represent them. This can result in the thing that should not be done to young artists and creatives.
Kevin Smith tells us it costs nothing to encourage an artist, as they might turn out to be the ones that make something that becomes a favorite. Ira Glass's advice for beginners is not to get discouraged that the things they turn out at first are not going to be up to their own standards for "good enough". There's an oft-cited number that says ten thousand hours of practice is what's needed to become an expert at something, whatever it may be. That's a very long row to hoe, especially for something that's maybe a side project, a work of passion, or something being done to explore new facets of identity. To make it all the way to mastery, there's going to be a lot of encouragement needed.
So while there are worse places to go, I would say that any child that has to go through the United States public school system has a very strong chance that their creative impulses will be destroyed or severely shackled.
U.S. schools reflect the culture around them, and that culture is obsessed with quantification. Numbers define and augment reality, too the point where having numerical data makes things appear more authoritative. Paradoxically, there is very little training on how to interpret and understand numbers, which creates a situation where more people are afraid of them, and it becomes easier to bullshit someone if there are numbers involved in what you are saying. Yet quantification continues and expands, so that there are now batteries of standardized tests for students, "productivity" measures for workers, and all sorts of serious money invested in trying to find numeric and algorithmic ways of understanding people. And even more serious money in making sure schools continue to progress in their number score every year, resulting in the cutting back of things that cannot be quantized in favor of those things that can. In such an environment, the necessary encouragement for creative endeavor is absent, because there is no space for creative endeavors in the first place.
The more perverse problem with a focus on numbers is that numbers themselves are an abstraction, a thing that both The Prisoner and Magritte knew quite well. Especially that borrowed Arabic rascal, zero. There is a lot that can be done with numbers and maths, such as bringing the cosmos down to a human-understandable level, or being able to comprehend and compute extremely large quantities of things, or as handy things to use to show off patterns that appear on our lives. Numbers are not a thing unto themselves, but always, always a representation of a specific something else. Whole persons do not easily abstract into numbers - something is always left out. The same person can support more than one candidate, hold more than one idea, do more than one thing, all simultaneously. To count a person, you must first define what part of them matters to your count, even if there are other things about them that will influence whether they end up in the count or not. Whole branches of the social sciences are dedicated to trying to find new and better ways of abstracting people so as to capture more of them into the numbers, so that more of the things that people do in their contexts can be captured and analyzed, and so there are less surprises that appear.
When it comes to schooling and the quantification of students, legislatures almost universally agree that the important parts of a student are whether they can pass tests in certain subjects so that our students can be compared to other students in a global contest of who has the best test-taking students. The standardized test components usually ask students to return bytes of knowledge on questions, often multiple-choice, with a later section asking for analysis or more complex construction of sentence and grammar, along with an argument or the critique of one. There's very little in standardized testing that says "Answer this question in the written form that suits you best." I suspect that they could get some very interesting and well-expressed verse, quips, or drawings that would indicate understanding as well as or better than a five-point essay. The things that are being sought in standardized tests are things that only a certain part of the population has as strengths, and only certain others can learn well enough to get by. Unsurprisingly, one of the things that matters in those cases is whether or not the school has enough funding to be able to give each student enough attention to ensure they are learning the material. And whether the home neighborhood of the students is peaceful and wealthy enough that they can concentrate on their studies. And whether the is a cultural attitude in that area that says doing well in school is an important priority. And a whole host of other things that have nothing to do at all with the abilities and strengths of the students themselves, which the test is trying and falling to capture, so that there can be decisions made about where money goes - perversely, the most goes to the places that need it least.
In this environment, governed by those numbers, creative expression has no place. It does not teach core competencies. Music's stringent maths requirements, exposure to foreign language terms, collaboration exercises, and abstract thinking training (the annotated dots on the page themselves do not music make, after all) are unseen, because one cannot teach music that way - it can only be done by making music, which means the sound of learning is in the sound itself, rather than a quantifiable element.
You can teach form and rhyme and style for poetry and prose. You can test to make sure someone understands how it goes. But the actual creation... more often than not, we remember the things that speak to us, that take the form and make it different or
break
it at just the right time. The twist ending, the way it's done - that can't be taught or mechanized yet. Some poetry only works when set to a beat, others only when spoken. Some poetry has to be seen.
The manual arts - sculpture, painting, architecture, smithing, fabrication, and more - the techniques can be taught, the forms studied, even replicated. Without these arts we do not exist and yet these are not considered important things for learning, nor is the time set aside at school for expression of these or other things, unless the school has decided that some part of their students' lives will not be dictated by numbers.
Against all of these odds, it is a wonder that any creativity survives. Employers are mentioning that they aren't getting graduates with the ability to think and analyze and come up with those elegant solutions, in code, in design, in implementation. Without the encouragement, a child, a student, a learner looks at all the works that have already been done and says, "I will not have that skill. Why should I try to do this?" And then the creativity goes with it.
It costs nothing to encourage an artist. Nurture that ambiguity and imagination of the children around you, regardless of how fantastical you find it or how much you think there's no skill present. Remind the adults around you that taste exceeds talent at the beginning, but talent will catch up with time and practice. It's easy to give up long before the point where it starts to click.
The numbers are abstractions, even the ones that have currency symbols in front of them that, regrettably, dictate how many of us get to pursue our art full-time and who gets to use what things to create with.
It's okay if we're not sure what the drawing is. That it is there is important, the rest are details.
