Statement from Jim Gunderson, CMP Board Chair

This is a time of great anxiety about our economic future. At home we are struggling to climb out of this severe economic downturn, and abroad we fear losing ground as the world's leading economy. This has put a spotlight on the critical issue of our future competitiveness and the essential role that education plays in that regard. But until recently, the response of policy makers to the challenge of promoting the competitiveness of our workforce through education has been oversimplified and incomplete, like so much other policy debate these days.

For several years the national response to promoting American competitiveness through education has been to focus on science, technology, engineering and math, or "STEM", at the expense of the broader range of fine and liberal arts subjects that have traditionally played a key role in the public school curriculum in the US. The flaw in that approach is that the key to American competitiveness has never been the number of scientists and engineers employed in this country. If that was the secret, the Soviet Union would have had the advantage, since it employed as many scientists and almost twice the number of engineers as the United States did. The answer is not the quantity of scientists and engineers, but rather the innovativeness of our scientists, engineers and the rest of our workforce.

Thankfully a new and more sensible approach to STEM has been gaining ground over the last few years, inspired in part by a Conference Board survey of U.S. business executives at leading corporations about what was needed to create the sort of workforce they thought we would require in the future. Their answer was an educational system that promoted creativity, and most of them ranked a degree in the arts as the most significant indicator of creativity. As an executive at Glaxo-Smith-Kline put it, "we need people who think with the creative side of their brains – people who have played in a band, who have painted, been involved in the community as volunteers. It enhances symbiotic thinking capabilities, not always thinking in the same paradigm, learning how to kick-start a new idea or how to get a job done better, less expensively."

We are now seeing a growing recognition that STEM education is missing key creativity-related components that are critical to developing the innovative workforce needed to maintain American economic competitiveness. It is fitting that it was one of the true pioneers of innovation in the American telecommunication industry, Harvey White, who pointed out that the arts need to be at the heart of the STEM curriculum, coining the term "STEAM". It has been gratifying to watch this important insight gain momentum over the course of 2010. Music, of course, is one of the most powerful of the arts in promoting creativity as well as enhancing students' cognitive and learning abilities generally. It is not only important to our public school children that it be a core part of the curriculum, but to the future of the country as a whole.