What role does art play in education? Can art be a source of knowledge? In creating art, do we progress towards a better understanding of reality or do we instead indulge our ignorance and delusions?
I personally dispense a lot of time trying to analyze all that happens on this world that we occupy in order to discern its significance, some universally applicable principle that perhaps could guide me through every situation I ever could possibly encounter, a metaphorical sort of short cut for long division. Writing is my tool for searching. I write in hopes of meeting some sort of resonance in the spirit of someone else. Often I stumble upon the works of others that do the same for me, or even I will meet a stimulation to abstract thought in the form of a regular conversation. On the Thursday following the Paris attacks I accompanied my host sister to school for the afternoon, receiving a taste of what life would be like were I enrolled in a French school.
Here in France students are obligated to decide the arena of their profession after their first year of high school. They are given the options of science, economic social, or literature, and after making that choice they begin taking courses specifically sculpted to coincide with their chosen career path. She has choosen the science path, hoping to become a doctor when grown up. On this day in particular however, she had two hours of philosophy, the subject of it being particularly relevant I found in light of all that has happened as of late. Her teacher posed questions of art, and the role that it plays in all of our individual education. Is it more of a benign factor, having a net effect of zero on our education? Art has the capacity to communicate vaguely what runs otherwise rampant and unchecked in our subconscious, to find the underlying takeaways among all the insanity. However, can it also work the other way? Perhaps it can tells us what all the world struggles with as the world as we know it is just a collection of all its inhabitants. It is each of their shared cultures and the way each new addition to society has budged just slightly its overall mode of function. In taking individual samples from this society in the form of art, perhaps we learn more about the world at large than we could ever hope to learn even from a comprehensive study.
The day I had come to her school was a bit out of the ordinary. Students of the school had organized a sort of tribute in homage for the lives lost in Paris. In the courtyard the entire school was gathered. An enormous outline of the Eiffel Tower had been drawn in chalk, and small traffic cones had been strategically placed to remind students to attempt and stay inside the drawn boundaries. I arrived too see the icon that had been empty a couple hours earlier filled by nearly the entire student body and also to join it myself. The picture they took forever will serve as a snapshot of the will of all the students gathered on that day. At dinner my host sister spoke at the speed of a motorboat, unable to stop speaking on the subject of the gathering in the courtyard. In her eyes she said, it transformed the way that students typically would respond to this sort of event. Instead of complacent ignorance of the events that happened for at least this afternoon the school community buzzed with curiosity, as the consciousness’ of hundreds of students were drawn to reflect on a single event, to ask themselves what it was, and what exactly it would mean for them.