Mae Jemison, astronaut, medical doctor, engineer, dancer and art collector on the reconcilliation of science and the arts

Dr. Mae Jemison (medical doctor and engineer) is a great achiever in multiple disciplines, but she is most renowned for her explorations in outerspace!  What many do not know about her,  however,  is that she also dances and is an avid collector of art.  In fact,  Dr. Jemison believes that the best,  most comprehensive education is one that combines science and the arts. 

I think our mission is to reconcile and reintegrate science and the arts because right now there is a schism that exists in popular culture...but it's really becoming critical now...to see that scientists can be creative and artists can be analytical.  The creativity we were required to have to conceive and build and launch the space shuttle springs from the same sources of imagination and analysis it took to carve a bundu statue or the ingenuity it took to design, choreograph and stage "Cry."  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ynf2IHiFqV0&feature=related   Each one of them are different manifestations, incarnations of creativity.

Dr. Jemison was a featured speaker on the renowned series,  TED talks.  To hear her compelling argument for arts integration in education,  click on the following link.

http://www.ted.com/talks/mae_jemison_on_teaching_arts_and_sciences_together.html

"We're educating people out of their creative capacities"

Sir Ken Robinson believes that our educational system should be radically changed.  He is an advocate for arts in education and subscribes to the theory of multiple intelligences. He has written many books and articles and  was a professor at the University of Warwick and Director of the Arts in Schools Project.  He was knighted in 2003.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

My contention is that creativity is now as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.

Kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go....They're not frightened of being wrong. Now I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original....And by the time they are adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.  And we run our companies...we stigmatize mistakes and we are now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make and the result is that we're educating people out of their creative capacities.

Many highly talented, BRILLIANT, creative people think they're not, because everything they're good at in school wasn't valued or was actually stigmatized.

We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence. We know three things about intelligence 1) It's diverse - we think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically, we think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic 3) It's distinct.

I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology - one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way we have strip-mined the earth - for a particular commodity.