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| | | Students in last year's Silk Road Connect culminating event
| © JENNIFER TAYLOR
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Dear Friends,
Like many in the audience at a recent Ford Foundation arts forum, I was texting, contributing to the online discussion of the day. But then I heard playwright Ariel Dorfman share this insight: “The love poems of today,” he said, “will be the basis for the constitutions of tomorrow.” I stopped writing and looked up.
I have been thinking about this notion ever since, because it explains why the Silk Road Project has developed an education program committed to nurturing creativity. While today’s aspiring poets and painters may not all become policymakers tomorrow, the skills they learn as artists allow them to see beyond things as they are, to envision better realities. If we don’t support and honor creativity in children today, there may not be anyone with the disciplined imagination to address the urgent issues of tomorrow.
Silk Road Connect, the arts integration approach we have developed with the help of our musicians and sixth graders in New York City over the past three years, is our attempt to do something today. This approach makes content memorable so students connect it with their own experience; it fosters empathy with others, so students identify as members of a larger community.
This spring, New York Times columnist David Brooks noted that in recent decades “we have tended to define human capital in the narrow way, emphasizing I.Q., degrees, and professional skills.” He cited research findings that focus on a range of deeper talents that need to be considered just as seriously: Attunement: "the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer" Equipoise: "the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings" Metis: "the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations" Sympathy: "the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups" Limerence: "… those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God."
The arts directly enhance these faculties. Yet despite the obvious importance of nurturing humanistic abilities, the decades-long decline in arts program support has not halted.
While the research Brooks refers to didn’t drive our approach, it reinforces what Yo-Yo had intuitively suggested when he encouraged us to create a passion-driven educational experience for students—one that turns learning from a requirement to a desire. By using the arts as a primary mode of learning, we are, as one teacher noted, “widening the lens through which our students envision themselves and the world.”
When Yo-Yo visited one of our pilot schools last week, bilingual students in one class asked him to listen to a song they wrote in anticipation of our “Night at the Caravanserai: Tales of Wonder” performance.
Yo-Yo Ma you listened to me
Now you’re part of our happy family
We made our dreams
And we will see you soon on June’s summer stage
They wrote this song, one student said, to “thank Yo-Yo because he opened our eyes…when he was a kid he always kept on trying and followed his dreams. He didn’t stop chasing them for any reason.”
Constitution writing may be a stretch for these kids today, but if we give them a framework to develop their creative intelligence, I think we can bet on them for tomorrow.
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Laura Freid
CEO & Executive Director | |
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