The Concrete Disciplines vs. The Arts and how they Relate to College

When Caroline Bird wrote in 1975 that for a majority of people, it was not worth it to go to college, she overlooked one very important contingent of college students: Artists. Music majors, visual and fine arts majors, and various other groups of those students studying the arts at college are indeed in the right place.

To be successful in the arts, just as in other fields, one of course needs talent. But raw, unrefined talent can only take someone so far. The rest of the way for an artist lies in refinement, which means that training and instruction are essential. One can take private lessons, but teachers qualified in the highest degree are becoming scarcer and scarcer and less and less accessible. Colleges are increasingly becoming the best place to find professional-caliber teachers.

This would not be as much of a problem if non-arts and non-magnet high schools (which make up the vast majority of secondary schools) were not in the state they were in at the moment. In recent decades, the focus in high schools has been on the "concrete disciplines:" reading, writing, math, and science. Arts programs - already considered ancillary - have been and are still being cut across the board, narrowing the options for many students, both those who have artistic ability and those who do not. Oftentimes, artistic pursuits are limited to extracurricular or non-scholastic programs.

This is a problem, even for those students who do not choose to study the arts in college. The arts are a wonderful way to express oneself, to discover things that may never have occurred to someone otherwise, and to think in an abstract manner, an extremely essential skill to have, especially in today's world. If the learning that stimulates these things is cut off, then we will eventually be faced with a race of automatons, a human race that will fail to think creatively.

For those students who do choose to study the arts, college is also essential for the fact that it provides rounding. Private lessons act, in a sense, like a trade school does: They train the student to do one thing and nothing else because they teach nothing else. Proficiency in multiple areas gives someone a host of benefits and advantages and makes for a more whole person.

So college serves several functions. As the "last bastion" of the highest-quality instruction in the arts, it is, for most students, the only place they can receive the guidance they need to become professionals. This instruction comes in a context where learning in other areas is also provided, which makes for a complete person. For those students whose focus is not the arts, it allows them the freedom to experience unconventional learning. That is what makes college essential: It's where the concrete and the abstract come together.