Week 1- Two Cultures

       Week 1: Two Cultures

       JP Snow’s introduction to the idea of two cultures gave me immediate flashbacks to senior year of high school.  My art teacher, Ms. Nock, from day one insisted that the faculties at our school, district, state, and country had gravely overlooked the power that art provides in many aspects of life.  Like Steven Pinker, she too would very much agree that “the parts of humanities that have been influenced by post modernism that deny that there is any such thing as human nature…” have become a major flaw in education, as well as society.  That’s why many of the projects in our art class were focused not solely on design, but how it connected to mathematics, architecture, physical sciences, and so forth.

Astronomy and the study of the universe is often an
intersection between art and science
  







In one project, my friend and I took two drastically different approaches to my teachers’ instructions to take a monocratic photo and add color which demonstrates an important societal meaning. While I chose to exemplify how artists and engineers often work hand in hand to create something that is not only functional but beautiful, my friend took a more abstract approach. His view of the project was not as restricted as mine was. As Sir Ken Robinson’s ASA animation put it, he used divergent thinking which allowed him to, “see lots of possible answers to a question…to think laterally”. 
My photo of the car on the top, and my friend's of an alien
abduction on the bottom
























This type of thinking certainly applies to life at UCLA. Here, we are often given questions by professors that don’t have a true answer.  That is where the combination of art and science is so important. While there are ways to test a theory or question using a scientific method, science doesn’t always provide a solution as to what the next step should be if the answer is not what we were looking for. However, an artistic mind would be able to incorporate vast numbers of ideas and solutions that maybe a linear thinker would not see.  This type of thinking must be taught at the source. Victoria Vesna and Kevin Kellly point out a multitude of ways that our education system does not do a sufficient job of preparing kids to think outside of a box because it is constantly putting them in one. Should we change the way our education system teaches the arts and sciences, it is a near certainty that this type of non-linear thinking will become the norm, rather then the unusual.
"If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree,
it will live its whole life believing it is stupid"
-Albert Einstein 

















Bibliography:

Kelly, Kevin. "The Third Culture." The Third Culture. N.p., n.d. Web. Feb. 1998

Pinkner, Steven. "Two Cultures: Steven Pinker." YouTube. YouTube, 18 May 2010. Web. 10 Apr. 2017.

RSA ANIMATE: Changing Education Paradigms. Perf. Sir Ken Robinson. N.p., 14 Oct. 2010. Web. 9 Apr. 2017.

Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Cambridge UP, 1959. Print.

Vesna, Victoria. "Toward a Third Culture: Being In Between." Leonardo. 34 (2001): 121-125. Print.

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