I went to a band concert last week. My youngest is in third grade and has moved up to the second rung on the School Holiday Pageant ladder, the rung that for the first time includes a band. I’ve been through this before; my oldest is now a high school junior, and these events now all have an eerie been there, heard that, quality.

But this was different: Instead of the anticipated three-notes-and-a-wounded-duck cacophony, there was complicated music. After a time if became clear why: A few of the student played exceptionally well, they had a motivated leader, and that raised the caliber of the whole band.

Afterwards, arms-crossed waiting by the cookie fund-raiser table, I kept hearing the same comments. Weren’t those kids talented? And the soloists, what talent!

This hardly seems surprising. After all, When it comes to the arts, we applaud talent. But if those students were in a math competition, or even a spelling bee, we would admire their intelligence.

Intelligent, not talented. Talented, not intelligent. This matters because labels matter. We practice to develop our talent; we learn to develop our intelligence.  Since school is for learning, we prioritize around the skills we label as requiring intelligence. After all, you can always practice at home.

So long as we think about the arts this way, they will always be undervalued in public education. The downside of this is that smart, artistic students become marginalized, forced into curricular tracks that devalue their skills at best, or undermine them at worst.

Last year, my youngest came home upset because she had been reprimanded…for her artwork. She had been asked to draw a picture of what she would look like at 100, and she drew a picture of a tombstone and some bones. The teacher took offense and told her, loudly, that it was inappropriate, took it away and made her do another. When I talked to the teacher about it, I asked her what she would look like at one hundred, but that’s another story.

This story is representative of so much that is wrong it’s hard to know where to start. Talk about a brilliant way to kill a kid’s love of school. But more deeply, it speaks to the power of the arts as a reflection of a student’s intellect and insight, not a talent that needs to be fed once in while so long as it stays within a narrow bandwidth of expected outcomes. My daughter thought about that assignment and made a visual expression that fit her idea, with irony no less. That sort of lateral thinking is an invaluable skill, the type of smarts we need to cultivate and celebrate in school.

So many creative breakthroughs come from thinking about things in new ways, seeing them, hearing them, sensing them, visualizing them as concepts and then connecting them to other ideas. But until we in the K12 world stop thinking about artistic creativity as talent, then we will never find a way to tap into the sort of intelligence that was on display this weekend at the marriage of my cousin, David.

David is a brilliant historian and engineer. He’s MIT’s Director of Program in Science, Technology, and Society. But this isn’t about David, it’s about an exchange between two artists who were his guests, Lana Caplan , a photographer and film-maker, and an accomplished concert pianist who played a beautiful piece by Chopin during the wedding.  While most of us heard the music, Lana shut her eyes and saw it in the image of a woman tenderly kissing the face of someone she loves, the eyes and eyebrows, cheeks, and nose. The pianist was floored: Lana had described exactly the images she had in mind. Lana is so intelligent she can see what musicians think. Damn.

What can we do in school to tap into that sort of intelligence, to celebrate it, to make its power evident, to develop it in every child? It’s so much more than a group project that includes the drawing of a flag. How about a project in which students have to visualize and depict information relationships in maps that show their relative position, importance, and validity? One in which they instruct someone to successfully complete a task only using four notes on a keyboard? One in which three teams use the same set moving images and sounds to create three different narratives of an event. 

Try this: For the next week, whenever you find yourself about to say talent, replace the word talent with intelligent. And if you see a kid drawing a cool picture on his notebook or another banging out a song on her keyboard, tell them how intelligent they are, ask them what would make school more interesting for them, then shut your eyes, and like Lana, see.

Mark Gross
CEO/Founder
School Loop