Great Artists Aren’t Always Model Students
From Big Think:
Poetry critic and Harvard professor Helen Vendler has published a refreshing article in Harvard magazine, in which she encourages the school to welcome mediocre students who also happen to be great writers. It’s about time someone of her stature exploded the ideal of the “well-rounded” student:
The truth is that many future poets, novelists, and screenwriters are not likely to be straight-A students, either in high school or in college. The arts through which they will discover themselves prize creativity, originality, and intensity above academic performance; they value introspection above extroversion, insight above rote learning. Such unusual students may be, in the long run, the graduates of whom we will be most proud. Do we have room for the reflective introvert as well as for the future leader? Will we enjoy the student who manages to do respectably but not brilliantly in all her subjects but one—but at that one surpasses all her companions? Will we welcome eagerly the person who has in high school been completely uninterested in public service or sports—but who may be the next Wallace Stevens?
Point well taken: why should we harass talented artists to show an aptitude for student government or lacrosse? It’s not as though we harass student athletes to become great artists. Vendler isn’t encouraging parochialism, just an allowance for the focus and discipline successful art requires:
It remains for us to identify them when they apply—to make sure they can do well enough to gain a degree, yes, but not to expect them to be well-rounded, or to become leaders. Some people in the arts do of course become leaders (they conduct as well as sing, or establish public-service organizations to increase literacy, or work for the reinstatement of the arts in schools). But one can’t quite picture Baudelaire pursuing public service, or Mozart spending time perfecting his mathematics. We need to be deeply attracted to the one-sided as well as the many-sided.
Link to the rest at Big Think and thanks to Randall for the tip.
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P.G.
LOL!
When I come back, next life, I don’t have to fuss with all that Phi Beta Whacko nonsense, or the prayer group, debating society?
Yay!
Here’s for the unmitigated individual. I look at some of the resumes that cross my desk when I’m hiring and I wonder if these goosegogs have any idea that I’ve seen all this tripe before. They bore the snot out of patience.
Be yerself, turn up on time and do not frighten the horses.
The rest is (mostly)hot cobblers.
brendan
So, Harvard should apply different (read: lower) standards if a student shows an aptitude for, say, baking or engine repair, too?
So: ‘Let’s lower our academic standards to admit talented writers to Harvard, because WE will be proud of them after they graduate.’ Not because ‘we’ have anything to teach them, or because THEY will get any benefit from a Harvard degree. (In the absence of strong statistics, I rely on abundant anecdotal evidence. My conclusion: A BFA in Creative Writing is an excellent way to beat the creativity out of a creative writer. The only thing that works more reliably is — you guessed it — an MFA in Creative Writing.)
Could this be more wrongheaded? It’s the snob’s version of the football scholarship, which Ivy Leaguers have been laughing at (justifiably) for decades.
If you write and print off your own Harvard degree is that still considered creative writing?
Much cheaper and still worth about the same.
Hmm, I don’t know, this smacks of putting the kids who couldn’t sit still into the GT programs because they were “artists” who hadn’t yet discovered their medium. Made it harder for those kids who had earned the right to be there to get the education they wanted and made the “problem” kids feel even worse about being behind.
But, hey, college has just become high school away from home, anyway, so who cares if anybody actually gets an education worth paying for?
Bravo! I love this. How many kids get the impression they are not smart or talented because they are either not generalists, or they are not good at the specific skills taught in school.
And I agree that the focus on extra-curriculars ignores those who are more introverted, focused or driven in a particular. This can definitely include writers.
I think what she is saying is terrific!
I appreciate your position, but this is like saying, “these kids don’t fit the mold, but they’re good kids, so let’s SHOVE them into the mold so they don’t think that they’re inferior because they don’t fit.”
If you want to help them, find a new mold.
Marc, actually, I think that’s what she’s suggesting.
Find a new mold.
Or, rather, expand our concepts of what a good mold is.