Robert Redford, Myths, and the Future

Orginally posted on "Future of Ed Blog", June 26th, 2010

by Jillian Darwish

“She saved my life,” Robert Redford said in his remarks this afternoon to begin the 2010 Americans for the Arts Half-Century Summit. He was speaking about the teacher who brought him an easel to use in class as a solution to his continuous doodling and distraction. He went on to challenge the audience to dispel the persistent myths about the arts, namely that they are a trivial pursuit and that they are unrelated to the economy.

Following Redford’s remarks, I participated on a panel with Eric Booth, Carrie Fitzsimmons, Jim Shelton and Christine Tebben to discuss, The Future of Arts Education.

So where do Redford’s myths and the future intersect?

We are rapidly moving to a future where fully democratized knowledge is resulting in what Jim Shelton called “commoditized expertise.” To keep our nation competitive and our shared future secure, we must:

1. Challenge ourselves to be more precise about what we mean when we use terms such as creativity and critical thinking (Thanks to Eric for the etymology lessons!);
2. Build our capacity for providing evidence as to how we develop and measure these outcomes (The references below are early signals we might build upon);
3. Move beyond simple knowledge acquisition as the aim for learning and include skills and habits of mind such as those below that will be critical to a thriving future. (The arts can play a tremendous role in building these capacities.)

Flexible Thinking: In a world in which future workers are likely to have as many as eight careers or more in their lifetimes, lifelong learning will be essential but flexibility of thought will be equally critical, enabling individuals to move seamlessly from one transition to another. (For capacity development through the arts see Artful Thinking at Harvard)

Resilience: Our Volatile, Uncertain, Chaotic and Ambiguous (VUCA) world, characterized by the pressures of bio-distress, and many others, will require Increasing attention not only to our physical health but also to our mental health if we are to cope with an increasingly stressful environment (For capacity development through the arts see the Royal Children’s Hospital’s Festival of Healthy Living )

Multiple Interpretations: The New Civic Discourse driver from the 2020 Forecast depicts a world in which continuous, bottom-up communication will be the norm, bringing an ever-widening circle of individuals with divergent views into contact with one another. If this dialogue is to be fruitful, not fractious, we will need to develop a new capacity for dialogue which includes the capacity to see multiple perspectives. (For capacity development through the arts see Teaching Literacy Through Art at the Guggenheim)

Willingness to Experiment and Learning from Mistakes: Dynamism and acceleration are hallmarks of our current age. To innovate in this world, rapid beta-building and the habits of mind such as a willingness to experiment and reframing of “mistakes” as failures, to “mistake” as learning opportunities will be required. (For capacity development through the arts see College of New Rochelle’s ArtsConnection)

Visual and Spatial Abilities: If we are to make sense of the vast amounts of knowledge we are creating, the knowledge era must become the visual era. We need to develop the capacity to bring multiple streams of information together in new ways to provide sophisticated and elegant pictures of complex situations. The Pattern Recognition driver from the 2020 Forecast has much more to say about this. (For capacity development through the arts see Winner and Hetland research)

And what will make it possible to bring these capacities into the future of learning? We need to bring our investment in education innovation in line with innovation investments in other sectors, increasing it from .3% to 3% of the total budget. We need a well-funded innovation effort that is distributed and that forms a national learning network. In this network, successful prototypes for the type of learning we seek will emerge, forming a knowledgebase and lever for national transformation.