Starving Arts for Sciences Is Wrong

A senior official of the Kenya Private Sector Alliance (KEPSA) recently advised that if Kenya continues training students in art subjects, then our roads and railways will continue being built by the Chinese.

This comes in the backdrop of a statement by the Cabinet Secretary of Education late last year that the Higher Education Loans Board (HELB) should increase funding for students pursuing science courses at the chagrin of arts students.

To fragment arts and sciences in this manner denigrates the important role that art plays in society. I offer an uncompromising critique of this as follows.

First, the fundamental objective of education is to improve human capital for exploitation by present and future generations.

This cannot be achieved by only focusing on how mechanical and inventive, within the default appreciation of these words, people can be, but also prioritizing how rationally investigative one can be of basic practices of human relations like expression, equality and discrimination. 

These are concepts that have been conceived, birthed, nurtured, and matured mostly by those who labor in the arts. They exist and occur to even those who are domiciled within the sciences.

Second, the perception that development is only reflected on the kind of infrastructure, technology, industries, and innovations that we have is not a humanist but a capitalist position that thrives in the context of the exploitation of mechanized citizens.

As our universities churn out more students who can innovate more Mobi Dawas, we ought to also produce more writers who can sensitize the public to push back against our shrinking civic space.

As renowned Cameroonian public intellectual Achille Mbembe says, we need as many concepts as we can get.

It is only in an environment where thought and expression is uninhibited or in situations where it is defended well, that the best scientists can develop more concepts to pave the way for more scientific inventions.

Third, to dictate students’ occupational orientation through education financing is to undemocratize higher learning and to undemocratize the idea of self-actualization, a realization that should be available for everyone.

Churchill Ongere - LakeHub Mural (2015)

Ostensibly, the university as a site of knowledge creation and exchange has become inaccessible due to its capitalist construct. It is only accessible to those who can pay a certain fee, speak certain languages, and produce particular credentials and documentations.

Statistics from the Commission for University Education show that 80 per cent of graduates are trained in art courses.

As such, a reduction of funding for the arts would be tantamount to make learning less accessible to majority people as most learners in institutions of higher learning in Kenya opt for the arts.

Fourth, contraction of space for the arts, both as an area of study, and as a space of practice, will produce a mechanical citizenry unable to philosophize outside the predestined grain of political thought.

Authoritarian regimes thrive in environments where the working class has been programmed to conceive productivity as only coming from being mechanical and not critical.

In such societies, as in Germany under Hitler, vocabularies of freedom and liberty are replaced by absurd injunctions like thought crime as imagined by George Orwell in his important work 1984.

Fifth, to fragment the arts and sciences further through starving the former of funds is to place an injunction against the advancement of the intersectionality and interoperability of the arts and sciences – something the world is just starting to embrace.

Advancing stagnant perceptual frames of what pertains to the domain of art and what fits into what science is, then to outrightly deprive art the space and resource to exist, inhibits opportunities for creation of new jobs – a role of government.

Instead, the government, through equal or need-based funding should encourage people to come up with new occupations that would require active appreciation and participation of both analytical, figurative discourse and empirical research. 

Such professions like architecture that require immense mathematical abilities yet also call for design adeptness, already exist and we ought to create more of them.

Encouragingly though, majority, and by extension the best of artists are usually those who have not undergone any formal training.

It is imperative to realize also, that a reduction in funding for the arts will further reduce the space to practice the arts.

For the foregoing reasons, we all ought to push for an equal or a need-based proportion of funding for the different faculties in our institutions of higher learning. 

This article was originally published on The Star newspaper : http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2017/05/08/arts-and-sciences-are-important_c1547462