A few years ago, I was heading to Jacksonville, Florida to give a couple of Navy lectures and on the flight from DFW next to me was a young man who didn’t look to be much more than 24 years old.He was a Marine, just returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan, and he was now on his way home for some much-deserved rest.We exchanged a few pleasantries before he leaned against the window and fell asleep.
I was going to Jacksonville to give a lecture at the Naval Air Station but was also going to see the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art.My brief conversation with my seatmate started me thinking of something that John Adams had said back at the height of the American Revolution.
In May 1780, Adams was on his second lengthy diplomatic mission to Europe and, as always, missing his wife, Abigail.“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy,” he explained to her in a letter.“My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy…in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”That hierarchy of goals was the real reason he had to be away from home at so perilous a time.
Implicit in Adams’ remark is his clear understanding that the arts, far from being a luxury or merely incidental to a good life, are actually something of a capstone—something that signifies attainment.A person who can attend to the arts, he believed, was a person who was fully developed.
But rarely in our current debate about the purpose of education do we hear a case made that the study of math, history and science are worthwhile because they then allow us to study and understand the arts.
Instead, a parent today might ruefully say that his children have to study math and science so they can get skills for the job market.Little in our concept of education encourages us to think that the study of art might really represent something much more worthwhile. We’re not even really sure about history.
What I saw at the Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art, however, pushed back against this.It had an exhibition up on the art of the 1960s that showed how fragmented and rapidly changing the American art scene was then.It was a visual representation of both the broader upheavals in society and the cultural resonance of the decade.And John Adams would have understood that while politics and war are subjects that warrant attention, by no means do they delineate the real capacity of human achievement.Indeed, to neglect the arts is to neglect what makes us human and helps us truly understand the world.
His attitude would serve us well today, if only we took the chance to consider it seriously.
