Since the school year is beginning for K-12, colleges and universities across the nation, I thought I’d talk about something that happens in educational settings (schools, libraries, etc.) that is frustrating and can be infuriating: pitting the arts against the sciences.
I have degrees in English and Art History, as well as a Masters in Library and Information Science; my husband is a mathematics professor at a highly-ranked liberal arts college. We both see the separation of these subjects as problematic to education and the learning environment, especially in the lower grades.
When it comes to arts and sciences, you cannot have one without the other. Pushing a division between them comes from a misunderstanding of both subjects. I’m sure the arguments are familiar: in our changing technological world, we need science, not art; art is creative, so not suited to logical people; art won’t help you get a job; only smart people study science. The list goes on.
These arguments misrepresent both art and science, and often people try to make them seem as different from one another as a lion is from an elephant. Ideas from one are not necessarily foreign concepts for the other, though. Let’s take the example of symmetry. Symmetry has been used by artists to make pleasing tile layouts on flat surfaces for centuries. Scientists also use symmetry, and for more than describing a leaf (most leaves are symmetric; the right side is a reflection of the left). Group Theory, for instance, is the study of symmetry, and groups basically underlie all mathematics—and symmetry underlies pretty much all of science.
My husband and I began discussing how people tend to separate STEM fields and the arts into widely incompatible studies because in the library system I used to work for, art programming was being dumped in favor of science ones. One had to link anything arty to some sort of literary work, or ditch it all-together in favor of a science program (encouraged, even demanded). Art for art’s sake became a dirty belief. The future is in STEM, not art, and besides, students need to learn something from every program, and what can you learn from art? I found this frustrating and infuriating on many levels. The art programs were the most popular ones I ran (150+ kids per program), and parents thanked me for providing a valuable activity for their children because the local schools had abandoned creative arts in favor of teaching to the standardized tests. Unfortunately, upper management saw art as a waste of time and resources, which could be better spent promoting science activities. That’s all well and good, but the science activities being foisted upon librarians had precious little to do with science and a lot to do with “I’m not a scientist and I don’t really understand the fields, but I think this could be something science-y”.
My favorite example of this occurred when I took an on-line workshop dedicated to providing reasons and ideas for scientific programming in libraries. I did not have to be convinced that science deserved a place in libraries—of course it does!!!—but the description of activities had me cringe. The workshop struggled to come up with ideas for older elementary school students, especially concerning math. The coordinators promoted dioramas as the way to go; have the students create a replica of the library and make proportional furniture to go inside (there’s the mathy part). I think they were thinking along the lines of ‘dollhouse’, but the way it came across to me: how effing boring. What does this have to do with math? The absolute surprise, which turns into disgust, upon mentioning this to mathematicians is amusing. Dioramas? Those aren’t mathematical.
And they’re not. The librarians who created the workshop simply have no idea how to incorporate mathematics (and really, many of the other hard sciences) into enjoyable programs for students. There are a few that lend well to easy investigation of certain topics in a library setting—biology is one of them—but most non-scientists have so little understanding of the subjects, they have no idea how to create a program based on those fields. When programs are designed and promoted, it’s usually the same ol’ same ol’ ideas that get regurgitated time and again, website to website, teacher’s manual to teacher’s manual. Sure, have a librarian-led program about paper airplane creation—tell the children that different wing shapes and paper weights make the planes fly differently. That’s all fine and good, but how many librarians explain why? How many get into the physics of flight? Experimenting with wing design, trial and error, let’s see whose plane flies furthest, is all well and good, and yes, scientists do many, many experiments, but if you don’t understand the science behind those experiments, you’re learning how to fold paper and not much else.
Let’s continue to look at flight. We’ve all seen the videos of early flight experiments. Learning to fly was hard. Someone didn’t just go, “Hey, I think I’m going to fly like a bird today!” and leap up, hurriedly slapped some sort of aircraft together, and take off. It took years to figure out the mechanics. It took creativity and ingenuity to come up with body plans and materials that might lend well to flight. Some ideas were a bit more creative than others, but the point is, the concepts we think of as artistic—creativity, imagination, inventiveness, having inspiration—all of these were inherent in those who worked hard to bring their flight imaginings to fruition. Scientists are creative, imaginative people, and one of the best ways to inspire creativity is art.
The people who insist that art and science are different entities that need their separate space have little understanding of either. What this insistence does is form artificial barriers between the two subjects, and make the stereotypes used to justify those barriers seem plausible. Artists are creative but ultimately not important. Scientists are smart geniuses and the wave of the future. When you have libraries and other educational institutions emphasizing distinctions like these, it inevitably instills the belief that the arts are not as important as the sciences, and that the smarter kids go into physics while the average ones try their hand at drawing.
Kids need to learn both. Art relies on science, and vs a vs. Do you think kilns, paints, mediums, etc., have nothing to do with science? Do you think coming up with ideas like super string theory isn’t creative? I could speak about Leonardo da Vinci here, a man who famously combined art and science, but some dismiss him as an example of a Renaissance Man. So I’ll focus on someone more recent—MC Escher.
Ah, Escher. Even if one does not know his name, many are familiar with his artwork. When I say Escher and stairs, quite a few people think about his lithograph Relativity. Escher, when I was in high school, was one of the the really cool artists—yeah, he didn’t hook himself up to electricity to see what happened, but he had this really cool self-portrait where he’s reflected in a sphere—but my art teachers never discussed his mathematical advancements, which he made to create his well-known symmetrical drawings.
Escher read a mathematics paper about the 17 different patterns used to tile a flat surface (Euclidean plane), written by mathematician George Pólya in 1924 (yes, there are other surfaces you can tile, like the hyperbolic plane, or a sphere—think soccer ball). These tessellations (mathematical term for tilings) are created when shapes are repeated over and over again, without gaps or overlap, and the pattern goes on forever if given the opportunity. Escher was fascinated with the concepts involved. He developed a thoughtful and mathematical way to produce symmetrical images, and even created his own notation to describe how.
Escher described four ways to tile a flat surface, which are used to create the 17 patterns: translation, reflection, rotation, and glide reflection. Translation is when a copy of a tile, or shape, is slid across the surface and drawn in another place. Reflection is where a copy of the shape is flipped, horizontally or vertically. Rotation has a focal point around which the shapes rotate, much like a pinwheel. In glide reflection, you slide a shape across the surface, then flip it. Escher used these four ways, alone or combined, to create his symmetrical drawings.
Escher used his experiences with art to carefully describe what artists had been doing for centuries; create beautiful works of art using these pleasing symmetrical layouts. Tilings, however, are not just interesting to artists; a mathematician wrote the paper that inspired Escher, after all. Tessellations are studied in geometry, by mathematicians who are interested in tiling planes. They refer to the 17 ways to tile a flat surface as the Wallpaper Groups because those patterns are used to create wallpaper designs.
When you look at the Wallpaper Groups, you might find it odd that the different patterns have names like p1, p2, etc. Those names come from crystallography. Crystallography, as you might imagine, is the study of crystals, from those found in stones to snowflakes. Crystals arrange themselves in symmetric patterns, so to understand crystals, you need to understand the Wallpaper Groups patterns.
Of course, symmetry is not just found in crystallography. It underlies all of physics. You cannot think of physics without thinking symmetry. No matter which way you look, you are going to have the same laws of physics, and they are going to apply in the same way.
Wow. We went from artist MC Escher describing symmetries based on a mathematics paper and creating his own symmetric drawings to crystallography and physics—and I didn’t even talk about the hyperbolic plane and the Hyperbolic Coral Reef Crochet Project, or aperiodic tilings, or so many other, related subjects! So much for art and science being separate entities.
One of the reasons I chose Escher as an example of how art and science entwine was not simply because of his association with mathematics. I also wanted to show that you can discuss science concepts in a way that can be educational but not mind-numbing (as an aside: I highly recommend watching this video opinion about math by Eugenia Cheng, and why we need to show how math is interesting, not dull). Symmetry is a concept that’s pretty easy to understand, is seen in art and nature and can be explained without advanced knowledge. You can have a program on symmetry for math, physics, astronomy, biology, art, music, because symmetry underlies EVERYTHING (and yes, breaking symmetry can be interesting as well. Aperiodic tilings, for instance, use special shapes that, initially, look like they can repeat the same pattern forever, but they do not).
So if dioramas are not your thing, why not have a library program where elementary students can create symmetrical images like Escher made. It’s mathematical, it’s artistic, and you can have far more fun with it than making proportional furniture. You don’t even have to concentrate on Escher; just have a program focused on symmetry (here’s an example from the Philadelphia Museum of Art).
Both the STEM fields and the arts are important, and playing them off one another inhibits an overall understanding of the world. Look how Escher informed the scientific study of symmetry. When it comes down to it, the arts and the sciences are sides to the same coin; you cannot have one without the other, even if they look superficially different. They are stronger together than apart. Promote critical thinking and creativity at the same time, and the next generation will go far.