Great thoughts from a recent speech by Dana Gioia, worth reading the whole speech for sure...here are some snippets:
Marcus Aurelius believed that the course of wisdom consisted of learning to trade easy pleasures for more complex and challenging ones. I worry about a culture that bit by bit trades off the challenging pleasures of art for the easy comforts of entertainment. And that is exactly what is happening—not just in the media, but in our schools and civic life.
Entertainment promises us a predictable pleasure—humor, thrills, emotional titillation, or even the odd delight of being vicariously terrified. It exploits and manipulates who we are rather than challenges us with a vision of who we might become. A child who spends a month mastering Halo or NBA Live on Xbox has not been awakened and transformed the way that child would be spending the time rehearsing a play or learning to draw.
Do you want to watch the world on a screen or live in it so meaningfully that you change it?
Speaking of the education system and how it's there to: "...create complete human beings capable of leading successful and productive lives in a free society...This is not happening now in American schools. Even if you forget the larger catastrophe that only 70 percent of American kids now graduate from high school, what are we to make of a public education system whose highest goal seems to be producing minimally competent entry-level workers?...To compete successfully, this country needs continued creativity, ingenuity, and innovation....Even if you (college grads) spent most of your free time watching Grey's Anatomy, playing Guitar Hero, or Facebooking your friends, those important endeavors were balanced by courses and conversations about literature, politics, technology, and ideas.
There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories, or songs, or images.
-Dana Gioia, American poet and Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, delivered the commencement address at Stanford in June.
Full speech here: http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/june20/gradtrans-062007.html
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