This is what I have to say in terms of investing in our future. Keep in mind that I have no children and most likely won't, so I may not be fully qualified to comment. OK, that was my disclaimer.



My experience as a teenager in a suburban high school was excruciating. It was a very white middle class suburb, focused heavily on sports. For a young outside-the-box thinker, this can easily be construed as a military training camp. The general tone of the way schools are run is just inviting this kind of cynicism- when it's obvious that much of the studen't time is spent learning to sit still, to perform meaningless tasks for some number, stand in line without complaint, bla bla bla... the end result being that schooling is more about conditioning than education; more about learning silence than expression.



One critical detail stands out in my high school career. Our school was given a $4 million grant to expand its facilities. What this did was open the door for establishment beurocrats to downsize the science and art departments, so that even more of this grant could go toward the new sports facilities that they were all hyperventilating about. This was driven by petty competition with the sports teams from neighboring towns, which dominated the discussion amongst the school board. It was hard to see any concern for the future of the students in this whole event.



Of course I personally place a lot of importance in the arts. Your average parent is naturally going to be concerned when their child chooses art school- the arts are not the direction to go if you want job security, or so the popular mythology goes. (In case America hasn't noticed yet, an engineering degree is no longer a guarantee of job security!). But what I'm talking about here is not training children to chase after an art career. Rather, I am emphasizing the importance of being fluent in the graphic language, simpy for the purpose of getting along better in the world.



We are visually oriented creatures. This is a fact of being human, not a cultural byproduct. So being naive to the use of imagery is a form of illiteracy. We are spoken to by images many hundreds or thousands of times a day, and these images will have their affect on us regardelss of how well schooled we are in reading them. This is an illustration of the power of the image- it speaks universally to anyone. A great deal of science and psychology have gone into understanding the deeper effects of imagery on our minds, and advertisers and propagandists are the first to exploit these understandings. The better we understand these things as individuals, the less we are victimized this way.



There are also more immediate gains to encouraging fluency in art for children: better coordination, stronger neural connections. Greater comprehension of the environment around them. The power to describe. The tools to visualize, and fulfill those visions. Ways for nerds to impress the bigger kids. The list goes on and on.



In my own case, I was lucky to grow up in a household that encouraged this kind of thought. I feel that the things that I learned in the course of my journey as an artist have been at least as valuable as any university education ever could be. My employment opportunities are vast and various, since art skills are useful in almost any industry. No diploma could have given me this freedom or this power.



People within the education establishent are not going to be thrilled by this kind of attitude. The entire institution of education is predicated on the idea that we are empty shells, that our education creates us as people and as workers. And of course this kind of system has its place. But it is wrong and short-sighted to discourage the personal empowerment of our children by denying them the means of expressing themselves and articulating their visions. If this kind of deliberate strangulation is necessary for the establishment to survive, then it is time for us to let it fall.