Brian Eno

I’m a big Brian Eno fan. Eno has produced seminal albums for U2, David Bowie, Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson and Cold Play. A new documentary on Eno has just been released.

I especially enjoy learning about art and creativity from Brian Eno.

Recently, Ezra Klein from The New York Times interviewed Eno. Here are some highlights from that conversation:

“EK: Your new book is called ‘What Art Does.’ Tell me, what does art do?”

“BE: Perhaps I should tell you first why I thought that question needed answering. In education in England – and, in fact, probably in most parts of the world – the budgets that always get cut are the arts budgets because there are apparently more important things that we should be teaching people – science, engineering, financial technology, that kind of thing.”

“EK: Are you really alive if you can’t short a stock?”

“BE: I’ve always thought that art is actually one of the most important things that humans do with their time. In my book, there’s a long list of things that I consider could come under the headline of art.”

“It includes, of course, obvious things like symphonies and photographs and paintings, but it also includes cardigans and jewelry and makeup and tattoos and all the things that humans do that they don’t have to do.”

“None of those things have survival benefits in the obvious sense. They’re things we do to do something in our mind, to change our mind in some way.”

“So what does art do? Why do we like it? I have this phrase in the book that children learn through play and adults play through art, and I think that’s really what it does.”

“When we look at children and we watch them playing, we don’t think, ‘Oh, they’re just wasting their time. They should do something more serious.’ We realize that when children play, they’re learning. They’re understanding about materials, about social relationships, about their own bodies, their own minds, about where they live – all of those things that are very important to understand.”

“And they do that infallibly and with a huge appetite. That’s what children like doing, and we understand – all of us understand – that that’s the way they learn things. Art is grown-up play. It’s a way of imagining things and imagining what they would feel like and imagining how they connect to other things that we know about and then feeding that knowledge back into our lives and into our relationships.”

Of course, the Klein interview goes on, but let’s focus on what Eno has shared just this far.

There’s a big debate going on right now about what qualifies as reading and writing. Is texting four hours a day a practice in reading and writing? I would say yes, but not in the way many people my age would define “reading and writing.”

I think the same about Eno’s question “What is art?,” and his expansive view on the answer to that question.

In traditional schools, we often are taught to defer to the adult in the room – the teacher – to answer questions like “What is art?” Instead, maybe we should depend on young learners and how they would answer that question. Chances are we would get much different answers from them than “adult learning leaders” like myself.

From my experience in public schools, Eno surprised me when he said, “When we look at children and we watch them playing, we don’t think, ‘Oh, they’re just wasting their time. They should do something more serious.’ We realize that when children play, they’re learning. They’re understanding about materials, about social relationships, about their own bodies, their own minds, about where they live – all of those things that are very important to understand.”

Eno must not have visited a traditional elementary campus recently. In most schools, the opportunity to play has been decreasing over the past 50 years. Sadly, comments like “They’re just wasting their time” or “They should do something more serious” have become more and more prevalent inside America’s schools. Understanding about materials, about social relationships, about their own bodies, their own minds, about where they live, have all been relegated to lower priority compared to high stakes testing.

After listening to the Eno interview, I was reminded of the great (or at least I thought he was great) Sir Ken Robinson and his TED talk on what not to do when it came to building a strong learning system. Robinson pleaded with traditional school leaders to stop focusing on test-taking and daily compliance. Instead, he championed the arts and personalized learning. I heard a lot of Sir Ken in Ezra Klein’s interview with Brian Eno.

The sad part of this story is that our traditional K-12 system, even if some leaders wanted to change their schools into more of what Eno talks about, is unable to make these types of changes – at least over the past 50 years. That’s why we require a new system of learning for our kids – all of our kids.

Til tomorrow. SVB