This is an ironic story. There is no one and no institution that has done more to set off an international test score competition than Andreas Schleicher of the OECD, which administers the periodic international tests called PISA, the Programme in International Student Assessment. Every nation wants to be first. Every nation waits anxiously to see whether its test scores in reading, mathematics, and science went up or down. In 2010, when the 2009 PISA scores were released, Arne Duncan and Barack Obama declared that the U.S. was facing another “Sputnik moment,” and it was time to crack down. Others wrung their hands and wondered how we could toughen up to compete with Shanghai.
The arts could become more important for young people than maths in the future, according to a leading education expert.
Researcher Andreas Schleicher, who leads the Programme for International Student Assessment at the intergovernmental economic organisation OECD, told a House of Commons inquiry that he believed young people could benefit more from the skills gained through creativity than test-based learning.
He was giving evidence to the Education Select Committee as part of an ongoing inquiry into the fourth industrial revolution – the influence of technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence on society.
Schleicher, who is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading educational thinkers, said: “I would say, in the fourth industrial revolution, arts may become more important than maths.”
“We talk about ‘soft skills’ often as social and emotional skills, and hard skills as about science and maths, but it might be the opposite,” he said, suggesting that science and maths may become ‘softer’ in future when the need for them decreases due to technology, and the ‘hard skills’ will be “your curiosity, your leadership, your persistence and your resilience”.
His comments come amid ongoing concerns about the narrowing of the education system in the UK to exclude creativity and prioritise academic subjects.
Campaigners argue that this is prohibiting many young people from pursuing creative careers. However, Schleicher said that too narrow a curriculum could also make young people less prepared for the demands of the future.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
May be?
Beat me to it once again!
So annoying. These “education experts” change their minds so much that they are never wrong. And are never held accountable for their misjudgments. Instead they still get labels like “education expert.”
The pathetic thing is that they change their tune so seamlessly without missing a beat and without ever admitting they were wrong to begin with. In other words, they act like they believed their new stance is something that they always believed and supported.
That’s a sure sign of a Shyster.
exactly the experience we have had in our endlessly reformed and invaded district: the “experts” are allowed to change their minds so much that they are never wrong.
If you try to actually follow all their mind changes, these people will make your head spin like Regan’s in the Exorcist
So, can we scrap the testing now? Please?
“Test their Creative Skills” (Andreas Shyster)
The test is not the issue
The thing that’s tested is
So, better grab a tissue
Cuz test is really bliss
Scrap the testing? Only if we figure out some other way to siphon off billions of dollars from school budgets into the coffers of educational publishers and computer software and hardware manufacturers for no defensible reason.
Don’t worry.
I’m sure Schleicher is working on a way of preserving his precious tests — and his even more precious job.
All these Ed Deform organizations have one prime directive–perpetuating themselves. Fordham, the College Board, PISA, etc.
Perfectly put, Bob. During my time here in Massachusetts (which is, thankfully about to come to an end, and not a moment too soon), I have wondered at times if I work for the City of Springfield, or Pearson.
The whole d—d country is working for Pearson. It’s sickening.
I’m sure this is just the prelude to a PISA test for creativity.
People like Shyst… I mean Schleicher are nothing if not predictable.
I am an elementary gifted teacher in an suburban school district. It seems that this push for creativity (at least here) is being implemented through gifted services and will require lower grade teachers of the gifted to push in and scout for “talent”. I fear that we will be measuring creativity, too. Are there any neuroscientists on our side of this battle? We need brain experts to speak up.
” I fear that we will be measuring creativity, too.”
Ha ha ha ha ha ah ha ha ha ah ha ha ha!
Please don’t take the laughter as a jab at you Danielle.
I’m laughing at the thoroughly absurd thought of “measuring creativity”.
I wonder what is the agreed upon standard unit of creativity (SUC) by the stakeholders? Where might that standard unit of creativity measurement (SUCM) exemplar (SUCME) be located so that all can then calibrate their SUCM device against the SUCME.
Nah, you won’t have to worry about “measuring creativity, too”. It can’t be done.
There is nothing about the human mind that a psycho-metrician (with the emphasis on psycho) can not measure.
Duane, I share your laughter at “measuring creativity,” but more because of how antithetical such measurement is to person with a creative mind, who is thoroughly committed, usually, to struggling against the very chains that those measurements represent or embody. This has me thinking of a little thought experiment I sometimes do in which Rumi or Blake or Dickinson or Emerson or Allen Ginsberg answers a high-stakes standardized ELA examination writing prompt in a manner that is basically a [insert expletive here] you to the designers of the test and to anyone who takes the test seriously–one that will go–whoosh–over such people’s heads. Gates, Lord Coleman, Vichy collaborators with “standards and testing,” I am talking to you.
Anyone heard of Dr. Jonathan Plucker? He will be leading a day of our PD with a keynote presentation and workshop activity on creativity. Dr. Plucker will then lead us through a creativity workshop. Here is some info about what Dr. Plucker will discuss:
Creativity is a highly valued 21st century skill, but what do we know about how to foster it in children? Is it the same in both children and adults? What does the latest research tell us about how to help create cultures of creativity? How can we even define it? We will explore the questions noted above as well as other various questions to illustrate and model key creativity-producing instructional strategies. An emphasis will be placed on understanding the nature of creativity and how it manifests itself in the lives of adults, with the application of that information to how children learn, both in and outside of school. The latest research and thinking on creativity and innovation will be emphasized throughout the talk.
People tend to think of arts education as somehow “soft.” But real arts education requires and enormous amount of both descriptive and procedural learning. Here’s a taste of what I mean. This is a list I made up for my film students of 34 ways to compose a frame. Though I prepared this for film students, it is applicable to painting, graphic design for print or for the web, photography, or any other frame-based medium. Students who know this stuff are in a position to do a better job of communicating with others. Knowledge of these and experience implementing them make a person a lot more employable in a lot of fields: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/art/
And here’s an outline that I made for my intro to film courses. Again, as you will see, there is a LOT to be learned. How useful is this stuff? Well, much of our communication, these days, takes place on the web, and video is perhaps the most effective means of web communication, so any employee in any job that requires communication via the web will benefit from knowing this content: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/film/
I daresay that for most students, knowledge of stuff like this will be a lot more useful to them, over their careers, than was that class in Trigonometry. I’m not knocking Trig class, btw. I’m just saying that most people, in their careers, aren’t called on to apply Trig very often. In my own life, I can remember precisely ONE time, over the many decades, when I used Trig to solve a practical problem that I faced. ONE. But how many times was I responsible for a layout of a web page, a print spread, an ad? Countless.
It should be obvious that in the age of computers, creativity inspired by arts education is becoming ever more important.
What computers do best are precisely the kind of repetitive tasks that STEM focuses on. Even computer “coding” is being done more and more by computers with each passing year.
But what computers can’t do is things that have never been previously imagined. Not yet anyway.
It does not take some PISA “genius” to recognize this and as I indicated above, I would bet that some sort of “creativity skills” test is on the horizon (if not already in the works,)
Yup. And that “creativity test” notion reminds me of a bit by James Thurber in which he talks about watching people cutting down elm trees to build an institution for people who were driven insane by the cutting down of elm trees.
That’s a good one
Any repetitive job can be given to a robot
Nice Bob. You’re a musician: what about music and mathematics?
Curious about your answer to your own question there, Mark!
Well, I really struggled with math as a kid, and I never learned play an instrument. I love music (as Nietzsche said, “Without music, life would be a mistake). A close friend of mine, who is a pianist, has made this point to me several times. And I’ve read various places that Bach’s music is basically math.
You doubtless know Douglas Hofstadter’s breathtaking book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which goes to great lengths about this. Like you, I’ve read studies that suggested that music and mathematics call upon the same mental resources, and it is quite interesting how many mathematicians are also musicians, though this might be accounted for simply as a propensity for play, for math is play (though not as it is usually taught in our K-12 schools, unfortunately). Here, something to delight you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-pyuaThp-c
If you haven’t watched this amazing video by Vi Hart, treat yourself. She has many others, also delightful. Also, see Paul Lockhart’s immortal essay on mathematics and art: “The Mathematician’s Lament.” Google it. It’s readily available.
Really cool video—compelling; thanks for sending it!
I do know Hofstadter’s book; I’ve not read it, but while I was a student at Hampshire College, a professor taught an enormously popular course named after the book, and at the center of which, obviously, was Godel, Escher, Bach. I heard it was a tough class….
It’s a wildly amusing book. Good, good fun!
Very interesting. The arts have always sustained the well educated. They were often kept from the masses because they might begin to think and speak out.
>
Bill Gates has electronic paintings throughout the “compound designed by a committee of software engineers” that he calls a house.
People like Gates have zero appreciation for real art, which explains why they have no problem producing so much junk and why their “education” policies encourage the production of more junk.
If Bill Gates had spent more time in the art room and less time in the computer room, Microsoft might actually have produced some decent software.
Gates likes to buy art. For the thrill of the purchase.
BG didn’t spend much time in a computer room…..he copied and stole ideas from other much smarter people. He had wealthy parents and a foot in the door from Daddy. BG is NO computer genius….he’s a marketing genius. He is a “Great Showman” much like IQ45….a very stable genius with visions of grandeur and a lot of money to keep inflating his already inflated ego.
Horrifying that these computer people think that VR “virtual field trips” with Holocaust images are a good idea
Gates owns the Codex Leicester, one of Leonardo’s most important notebooks. When he bought it, about the same time he bought the Bettman Archive, I wondered what he was up to. Probably just showing off.
It was rare so he had to own it.
Not just showing off on the Bettmann Archive purchase.
On Gates effort to capture exclusive rights to digital images.
1989: Microsoft founder Bill Gates forms Interactive Home Systems.
1995: The Bettmann Archive is acquired, dramatically increasing the company’s visual content collection.
1996: Exclusive rights to 40,000 Ansel Adams photographs are obtained.
1997: New management leads Corbis to greater presence on the Internet.
1998: Digital Stock Corp. and Westlight are acquired, greatly increasing content available to professional customers.
1999: France-based Sygma is acquired, adding 40 million images to Corbis’s content collection.
What little I know about rights and permissions I learned from seeking images for visual arts publications in the midst of the Gates’ efforts to hoard images assembled in museums or photo archives and profit from these. The Bettmann archive was the main source of images for every social studies and history text. Museums had tiers of pricing for permissions to use images in their collections. More of that history here, and an excellent account of the scope of Gates’ acquisitions. The list of “competitors” is out of date. http://www.company-histories.com/Corbis-Corporation-Company-History.html
Online resources to enhance our understanding the world heritage of art, artifacts, and architecture are not just in archives like those assembled under the brand names of Corbis or Getty. It is now possible to take a virtual reality field trips to our National Gallery, Smithsonian, and other venues…if you have a smartphone, simple holder for the phone, and an app for the trip. Teachers can serve as leaders of these trips by using an iPad.
Goggle’s Arts and Culture app provides a curated collection of images from forty-six museums, in forty-two countries, plus virtual tours of museums, architecture, and world heritage sites. For some of the virtual tours, Google’s Paris-based Arts and Culture Center has recruited interpretive commentary from experts, available in eighteen languages.
Technology for Google’s virtual tours builds on Google’s “street views” in Goggle maps, and Picasa’s extraordinary “zoom” for seeing details. (Picasa is not longer available in its original form).
Several cautions have surfaced with the use of a VR headset. First, you should not be prone to disorientation and nausea. (The same is true with a field trip on a crowded school bus). Another issue the role of VR as an inducer of empathy and reduction of “psychological distance” between the viewer and what is viewed. The ethical issues in the use of VR are just surfacing, with no clear guidance on school uses. Are you ready to revisit the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Towers and images from the Holocaust in VR?
Wow! Thanks for this, Laura.
Gates prolly bought the Codex because he thought it contained some cool computer code that he could use in Windows
“Veddy Intelesthing” conversation here. Steve K. (above) might be “intelesthed” to know that,
back in 1963, the British writer/culture-watcher/philosopher, C. P. Snow, wrote that people who
think like your note suggests you do are “self-impoverished.” I would call them **self-anesthetized.”
Snow’s “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution” was about just the problems we are
experiencing now in education. He almost predicted it–specializing; over-emphasizing one set of specialties over another; and crystalizing (tribalizing) groups of people under each specialty who then (sniff, sniff) ignore other groups, treating them with various degrees of contempt. (He compared/correlated England, Russia, and the United States in this work.)
Guess what: Scheichier and Bob Shepherd have it EXACTLY RIGHT. People need to learn to chew gum and walk at the same time.
But where human education is concerned, walking and chewing gum are best understood as ESSENTIALLY INTERDEPENDENT and mutually-inspiring. Otherwise, each tribal group ends up thinking THEIR field, and their de facto limited HORIZON, is the MEASURE OF ALL THINGS. <–And that is otherwise known as the definition of a closed mind. CBK
ADDENDUM to my “Veddy” note: Sorry about the margin problems–I’ll fix it the next time. Also, the “self-impoverishment” from C. P. Snow’s book is on page 15; and the citation is: “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” the Rede Lecture/1959. Cambridge University Press, New York (1963) (Eleventh printing in 1963). CBK
Except the ” conflict” within education that has been raging for decades now (about standardized testing, VAM, school grades, NCLB and all the rest) is actually not between the humanities and real sciences (and scientists)
It is between pseudoscientists — economists, psychometricians and computer “scientists” — engaging in pseudo science and those who are confined to living in the real world (governed by real science).
I don’t think Diane and most teachers have any problem with real science or real scientists ( I know I don’t), who, (quite unlike pseudoscientists like Hanushek, Chetty, Friedman, Rockoff, William Sanders, Andreas Schleicher, Bill Gates, David Coleman, Mark Zuckerburg, Jason Zimba and so many others) have NOT been imposing all their voodoo mumbo jumbo on students, teachers and schools for at least two decades now.
SomeDAM Poet . . . so it seems you are saying that the past and present arguments are pretty-much leaving out the importance of the arts and humanities–at all. Also, and just for the record, it seems that, based on C. P. Snow’s distinctions, Gates is less a scientist (involved in pure theory) than a technician (or involved in applied science). CBK
Stated eloquently by Daniel Pink in his book: A Whole New Mind.
Any well-rounded person is good both in arts and maths because maths is art and art needs maths (for perspective, light, reflection, special colors, etc). Pitting art against maths is a usual mistake of those who know neither art nor maths. Anyone have seen Bob McCall’s paintings? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONvJ0xXT2xY How about Alexey Leonov’s paintings? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCb54gWpMtk
Thank you, BA, for these delightful links. Fascinating!!!
It would have been wiser for him to pit creativity against utilitarianism (though even that distinction breaks down–one things of the Arts and Crafts Movement or of the 20th-century Futurism and Modernism movements). And at the same time that people make this pitch for more creativity curricula and pedagogy, I think, they should be making the pitch for remaking our most utilitarian instruction (e.g., in math) into training in an artform.
Sigh. And once again history, geography and civics are ignored. They’re not important at all, apparently. Sarcasm folks. But just as with STEM, the new push leaves out teaching kids how to best be good citizens support democratic institutions.
Here, a little piece on play and the origins of art that gets at one reason why the arts are so important–aside from the ones given by those apologists for art who try to get funding by arguing how important say, theatre classes are to preparing someone to be a mid-level marketing manager at Microsoft.
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/03/18/play-and-the-origins-of-art/
NSFW Warning: This piece contains material not suitable for sharing in a K-12 classroom.
Wonderful conversation. About “testing creativity” My school district is already “grading” 21st century skills (duh–they are timeless)–Creativity, collaboration, communication. Teachers are just supposed to give students starting in KINDERGARTEN a 1-3 score for these skills. They are just supposed to walk around with an iPad and guess what the child should get because there is no “test.” It is just the teacher’s opinion. How do you think you would feel if your kindergartener failed creativity!? So, since all this malarkey has been brought to you by the usual suspects, I just coined a word: Zuckerzosgate. I think that describes how taxpayers are being hoodwinked by these “isolationists.” Time to call it a scandal. Kathleen Mikulka
That should have read “solutionists” –I don’t remember who coined the word, but it refers to those who assume rather than investigate the results of their ideas.