The world of education is changing as dollars get tighter, Aleksander Sternfeld-Dunn notes.
Too often, he contends, rural schools and colleges scale back fine arts classes, or cut them altogether, because those classes are seen as “luxury items.”
Even Iola’s USD 257, with its rich history in fine arts (in no small part because of the district’s affiliation with the Bowlus Fine Arts Center) has taken a harder look at how the district can afford to maintain that relationship.
School board members have asked for a court’s opinion on the implications of it pulling classes from the Bowlus.
Sternfeld-Dunn takes the opposite view.
“I see a lot of potential here,” he told the Register this week in a telephone interview.
Sternfeld-Dunn will make “A Case For Creativity” for the public at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Creitz Recital Hall in the Bowlus. He’ll also speak with a number of Iola High School instructors and other educators during the day Tuesday and Wednesday.
THE MOVE for districts to place additional emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) is rooted in the effort to better prepare students for the workforce, Sternfeld-Dunn said.
And that’s fine. Nursing, business and engineering are noble professions.
However, students focused solely in that environment may not be learning a viable job skill — creativity.
It takes not only intelligence but also creativity to make products functional and beautiful, he said.
Take, for example, the cell phone.
“Each phone does essentially the same thing: call people, surf the Internet, text,” Sternfeld-Dunn said. “And machines are perfectly capable of assembling the phones.
“So why do so many people tend to gravitate to only the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy?” he asked. “It’s because of the way they look, the way they interface, their simplicity and design.”
Those designs, he said, required creativity: people constantly striving to make them easier and more efficient to use.
