Long Live the Arts!

There was a time when most local secondary school students were strenuously schooled in the belief that the Arts were second best and that there was simply no future for those who preferred them to the sciences. That was at the height of the educated unemployment problem in this country in the sixties and the early seventies. The watershed political event of those times was the cataclysmic bloody youth upheaval of 1971 in Sri Lanka’s South which was put down by the government of the day with ruthless efficiency, at the cost of tens of thousands of youthful lives.

There is no clear, unambiguous indication that the lot of the average Arts graduate has improved over the years. We wonder whether the number of years an Arts graduate is compelled to idle at home has shortened from those times in the early eighties, for instance, when an average Sinhala and Tamil-educated graduate spent three to four years among the ranks of the unemployed, usually in a state of dejection and disillusionment. This accounted substantially for the backing the failed uprising of 1971 managed to muster among the young of this land.

These calamities played a major role in driving home to most educationists of those decades, what seemed to be the intrinsic value of the sciences over the Arts or aesthetic disciplines. The general belief was that since the Arts did not possess any utility value, they were of little use to the student, since employment would be hard to come by for those who opted for an Arts-based education. In short, an inculcation of the Arts brought little or no practical benefits and needed to be downgraded if not abandoned by schools and seats of higher education altogether.

Fortunately, although the tendency was to downgrade the Arts on account of their seeming uselessness from the job procurement viewpoint, they were not abandoned altogether and they survived those years of devaluation. Moreover, many schools in the public school system could not provide their students with a comprehensive science-based education and had to make do with the Arts. Consequently, the country was left with the task of fending for a glut of Arts graduates who were not employable as their disciplines were considered of little or no practical value.

We share the general concern of the public over the lot and relevance of our Arts graduates. Education at particularly secondary, undergraduate and graduate levels should prove relevant and utilitarian benefit is a vital aspect of relevance. Yet, we do not intend to veer to the superficial and narrow extreme of describing the Arts as being totally irrelevant and out of step with human needs. The latter parochial and myopic assessment of the Arts we completely reject, while noting the issues growing out of relevance.

From this point of view, we consider a recent observation made by Education Minister Bandula Gunawardena on the importance of the Arts, as most vital and timely. He said that the Arts should be steadily promoted in our schools because they contribute towards moulding a sensitive generation. He called on parents of primary and secondary school students to encourage the study of aesthetic disciplines among their wards, on account of their effectiveness in shaping the human sensibility. Besides, the minister observed that excessive and oppressive pressure should not be brought on students to excel at the more prominent public examinations, such as, the Year 5 Scholarship, the GCE O/L and A/L examinations. This could prevent students from freely cultivating an interest in the Arts.

Ideally, the student at secondary level and beyond should be encouraged into pursuing a balanced or liberal education which features a juxtaposing of science and Arts subjects. This is on account of the fact that both these streams of knowledge are essential for the growth of the human personality. A sensibility that is shaped by the empirical sciences only is highly limited, inasmuch as a sensibility that is moulded by aesthetic subjects entirely too could be seen as defective. For the acquiring of balanced personal growth, a knowledge of both the sciences and the Arts is essential.

Accordingly, we welcome this renewed interest in the Arts on the part of the authorities. The study of the Arts should be continued in this country in view of the contribution it makes to balanced personal growth. While contemporary life would be difficult to comprehend without a knowledge of the Theory of Relativity, for instance, who would contend that a study and appreciation of the Shakespearean classic, ‘King Lear’, to take just one example, does not enrich the human emotionally? We need to think on these things as we mould our young to face modern day challenges.