Port Has a Chance to Shape the Future : Arts: It could incorporate education into its public art master plan, thereby giving students a background and thinking skills they sadly lack.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

--Albert Einstein

It’s not surprising that the San Diego Unified Port District had to go back to square one with its tempestuous public art program. Before public art can be accepted, the public has to know something about art. And very few people do.

Many of us were not educated in art. Or, to put it another way, art was not in our educations.

Music, drama, the visual arts, dance--they’re considered frills to be cut whenever money is short. When test scores are low, school administrators and boards of education push for verbal and math skills. When elementary school teachers have to cope with 30 children and eight or nine subjects, art is often relegated to the bottom of the priority list.

In high school, getting into college is a principal goal. Parents and teachers often press children into taking advanced-placement classes in math and the sciences, so they will score well on SAT tests. The arts--if available--take second place.

It’s little better at most colleges, where two or three arts or humanities courses will fulfill general-education requirements. At teacher training institutions, tomorrow’s elementary school teachers receive precious little exposure to arts education techniques.

To be sure, some students--such as the 10 San Diego County teen-agers recently selected to attend the California State Summer School of the Arts--push themselves to master various art forms. But they make up a tiny minority. Most of the rest of us reach adulthood artistically illiterate.

So the Port District faces a substantial education challenge as it tries to rebuild its public art program. The four community hearings it is holding are a good start. In addition to gathering ideas from the public for an art master plan, the port’s consultants will be teaching the public about art, with slides and discussions.

However, the port’s $2.2-million art fund affords a rare opportunity to accomplish much more.

Working with the San Diego County Office of Education, the port could design a curriculum around each new public artwork. In the curriculum, the artists’ creative process could be explained along with scientific information about the physical attributes of the medium. Through a variety of student assignments, the art could be tied into social studies, language arts and other subjects.

Research shows that classes in music, art, dance and acting may provide students with better problem-solving techniques than some courses in the hard sciences. According to Robert Root-Bernstein, a historian of science, a biochemist at Michigan State University and a former MacArthur Prize fellow, a school’s emphasis on verbal and math skills may put limits on the kinds of problems students can solve.

Having conducted extensive research into the link between artistic creativity and scientific imagination, Root-Bernstein says: “Most people who solve problems don’t actually deal with words or mathematical symbols. In one way or another, you have to be able to model the world inside your head.”

It is no coincidence that many of the great scientists were also artists. Albert Einstein, Johannes Kepler and Max Planck were musicians; Kepler was also an artist, as was Isaac Newton; Galileo was a poet and literary critic.

Root-Bernstein has found a very high correlation among the greatest scientists and two- and three-dimensional thinking skills. With these internal “seeing” skills, a physicist may convert mathematical equations into a system, Root-Bernstein says, then become the system himself, play-acting changes in it to solve the problem at hand.

While verbal and math skills are means of communicating a problem or a breakthrough to others, it is the arts that offer students techniques of mentally imaging problems in order to solve them. “Music trains the mind to see how complexity, as in a Bach fugue or a physiological process, results from simple rules and patterns,” according to UC Santa Cruz mathematician Ralph Abraham.

Another reason to teach the arts is that they engage students’ minds and their visual, aural and kinesthetic learning processes. By rehearsing in a music or dance ensemble or with other students in a play, children can learn socialization skills and increase their self-esteem. In pragmatic terms, the arts provide a child with uplifting, positive school experiences.

Today’s students are tomorrow’s work force. Business and science need workers and leaders who are creative, confident and disciplined, who have vision, passion and an awareness of the world.

The arts foster all of these attributes. They require the ability to observe and create patterns, to focus on a task and take apart a problem. These skills will be absolutely necessary for success in the global economy of the future.

Therefore, it is essential that the Port District not miss this opportunity, in putting together its art master plan, to examine how to use its resources, and how art, in a recreational context, can educate students.

A well-designed educational component of the art plan could bring generations of students into contact with top-flight artists and art. It could afford firsthand insight into creative problem-solving. And, in the wake of past port art controversies, it could offer the general public an understanding of the aesthetics of modern art.