On Proximity

We're coming up on the first Autumn in 18 years that I don't have to go to school. It's every bit as surreal as you'd expect. Thinking about school reminded me of a thought that I kept coming back to all last year.
I took a music credit both semesters of last year. It counted nothing towards my degree, but I finally decided to take upright bass lessons with one of the best players in our area. It was a lot of work, but in many ways it was a lot more fun and more rewarding than my coursework. That could have been entirely because it allowed me to escape from my engineering courses and hole up in a practice room. After all, practicing was required coursework. It was for school. I had to.

What truly fascinated me was how close the two buildings are together. That is, the art building and the science/engineering building. Their entrances are literally on opposite sides of the same road. And they are, together, the two largest buildings on UNH's campus. Yet for all their proximity and relative sizes, they are worlds apart on the inside.

Inside the science/engineering building are clean modern classrooms that were built in 2005. Students pour over textbooks at all hours of the day and night. The 24/7 unlocked doors provide access to project rooms whenever necessary. There is a dedicated library inside, just for engineering texts. In a word, the building is designed to be accommodating to its students. The system is designed to maximize success.

Inside the art building are cement-block walls from the 60s that have never been renovated. Students pour over music and studio projects. The doors lock at a reasonable hour most days, which means that the students sometimes break into the building in order to get their practicing or projects done on time. The system is not as nice to the art students. It forces them to break rules, and bends them until they create what their professors want.

I have no insight into art education, though I believe it may be broken. But I am floored by these two buildings. Because when I thought about it, they represent two very fundamental ideas that separate humanity from the rest of the world.
We frequently consider "art" to mean "expression". That is, you can consider anything as "art" if it is the product of someone's imagination, a free-flowing work from inside of someone's mind. Animals do not generally exhibit art-making behavior. It is a concept unique to us, that you can draw a picture and I can appreciate it, and somehow you can express very complicated ideas that could never be vocalized, and relate them without saying a word.

And on the other side of the "right-brain left-brain" is Mathematics, another fundamental concept unique to humans. Mathematics is a tool that we've created, and yet are still trying to discover. It is a completely different form of expression, one that uses numbers and expressions to model the universe that we live in.

For some reason or another, individuals tend to specialize in either "art" or "math". We put the buildings right next to each other, but few people manage to use both of them. The mere proximity isn't enough to make artists out of engineers, or mathematicians out of musicians.