I grew up in India and attended high school there. My
high school experience is a great example of the distinction between art and science,
and the respective stereotypes that C.P. Snow talks about in his famous lecture
on two cultures. My high school batch was divided into three sections: the science
class, the commerce class, and the humanities class. There was minimal academic
interaction between the three sections as even the common subjects like English
were taught by different teachers in the different sections. My batch was the
second batch in the school’s 150 year history that was allowed to take science
courses along with a humanities or commerce course. I belonged to the science class
and I had the option of taking a Psychology course instead of Chemistry, but I
wasn’t bold enough. While you might think that newly introduced flexibility would
be welcome, only a few from the science class decided to be adventurous. I wasn’t
particularly fond of chemistry, but as per the stereotype, the science class
students were smarter and the science class subjects were the most challenging.
After two years of thoroughly disliking Chemistry, I realized that I should
have chosen what I was interested in. The physical distinction of a science class
and an arts/humanities class impacted my education. The distinction even manifested
itself in tests. One test question was “Is Commerce an art or a science?” This
exemplifies C.P. Snow’s claim that curricula at educational institutions are
responsible for creating a distinction between two cultures: art and science.
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| "Is Commerce an art or a science?" |
Since coming to UCLA the distinction has been fading
away for me. Even though I was a Business Economics major I was able to enroll
in a variety of courses including Computer Science, Psychology, and
Acting. The division between North and South campus did not hold me back. A subject
area that I grew deeply interested in is Behavioral Economics; the intersection
of Economics and Psychology; disciplines that are taught at the opposite ends
of campus at UCLA. Behavioral Economics is a recently emerging subject area,
and is evidence of the ‘Third Culture’ that C.P. Snow mentions in his essay The Two Cultures and A Second Look.
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| Humans are loss adverse as predicted by Behavioral Economist's Kahneman and Tversky |
Fortunately, the gap between art and science, is
getting smaller. The fact that IBM’s Watson, a machine that integrates human linguistics
and computer science, won the American television gameshow Jeopardy, is a huge
milestone in this direction.
References
Snow, C. P. “Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” Reading. 1959. New York: Cambridge UP, 1961. Print.
Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures: And a Second Look. N.p.: n.p., 1963. Print
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Print.
Vesna, Victoria. "TwoCultures Part1." YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. 05 Apr. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNI7dF3DIAM>.
Vesna, Victoria. "TwoCultures Pt2." YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. 05 Apr. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUr4xxZ_0gw>.
I think it's interesting that a school system that's been in place for over a hundred years in India was recently begun to be implemented in my area at home (Bay Area). There, the new system is met with mixed reviews with some parents feeling that it confines students to a set path too soon in their career. I agree with you that college has given me the opportunity to explore other subjects and have thoroughly enjoyed many of the classes outside my major.
ReplyDeleteI am glad to read your blog which shares the similar idea with mine. Especially since the opening paragraph, your introduction of the indian high school education system causes much sympathy from me because if you read my blog, you will also notice that the Chinese high school system works in the same way. I chose to study science when I was in high school and rarely had chance to learn those liberal arts subjects since then. Thus I fully understand and agree with your feeling of a kind of transition from high school to UCLA where we can learn what we like more broadly with much less restrictions. Furthermore, your statement also offers proof and thus answers some of my confusion about creativity. As we all know, countries like India and China score highly on the education front while western countries such as Switzerland or Finland may not rank the top on some education variable (tertiary education) but the latter have more innovative ability than asian countries. Maybe the distinction caused by education is a big factor of the problem.
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