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Even through recession, innovation continues
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Two inspiring pieces were featured in the New York Times over the weekend - the reading of which lately has felt like watching a whale on the extinction list about to go belly-up. One was by op-ed writer Thomas Friedman (“The World is Flat” and “Hot, Flat and Crowded”), who is attending the Energy and Resources climate conference in New Dehli; the other, by long-time NYT art critic Holland Cotter. Each piece, while focused on issues respectively political and cultural, discussed how the recession - that may become a global depression - may actually be helping us in certain ways, especially, in my view at least, pertaining to education.
Friedman’s piece, “Yes, They Could. So They Did,” opined on two recent Yale grads who drove a plug-in electric car outfitted with solar panels in a tour across India, in order to increase awareness about climate change. The women were outfitted on their trek with a Bollywood dance troupe, a solar-powered (musical) band, and a Czech with a truck that ran on vegetable oil.
Reading the quotes from the young women was exciting. One is a mechanical engineer, the other a Fulbright scholar and solar entrepreneur, and they had me on the edge of my seat. My favorite, from Alexis Ringwald: “Why did this tour happen?.. Well ... the world needs crazy ideas to change things, because the conventional way of thinking is not working anymore.”
On that very same line of thinking, Holland Cotter was explaining why the recession would bring back the good art in his piece “The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art!” After a decade or so of indulgent, bloated spending on art, as well as the massive marketing of young, straight-out-of-school talent, Cotter hopes that the world economic downturn will bring some of the art that other downturns have: he points out specifically how each recession in the 20th century has produced blockbuster, breakthrough art, while during economic boom times, the art has remained status quo.
And how do these two articles, which I urge you to go and read, pertain to public education? They give an articulate voice to a thought I had recently: having nothing makes you work harder for something.
Not only are these articles about two great subject matters that are both timely and engaging – climate change and art – but they also speak to us on another level, the one where we get up every day and send our kids to public school in the face of falling-down schools, cutbacks, pinkslips, and uncertain futures for many of us. And yet… the young keep innovating. In the face of what appears to be adversity, some crazy ideas come forth, many of them just crazy enough to work.
This is good reason to encourage your kids to experiment in school, to stick their noses out, to fall flat on their faces – even as they’re encouraged to conform, to homogenize. Those failures may lead to some really crazy thinking, the kind that gets you a Fulbright, or a free ride across India.
I’m just saying.
