Talent and Arts in the Curriculum, Pt. 1

I would like to discuss talent carefully. Rather than defending talent as a term or concept, I want to listen to how we use the word and think about what purposes it serves when we speak. More carefully, I want to listen to how we use the word in school and think about how we are defining talent for our students.

When we talk about talent, we are usually talking about something that we are good at. Most commonly, perhaps, we are talking about things we do well without practice, almost by instinct. True, we may say a person has a talent without knowing whether they were born with the gift or gained it through years of hard practice. But we tend to practice what we have a talent for, playing to our strengths. What separates the best athletes from the hardest working athletes is not the amount of practice they put in, it is the talent that lies at the base of all that hard work. So while we do not divorce talent from practice, we favor the notion that many talents are inborn, original or even unlearned.

Many teachers intuit that our use of the word “talent” implies a frighteningly genetic and elitist idea of human potential—you got it or you ain’t. As a counter, we are careful to remind our students that everyone has some talent. In fact, by the time they are in middle school, the kids have heard this platitude so many times that it already rings hollow. Many students wonder when they are going to get their talent, or why the talents they do have seem so much less noteworthy or productive than someone else’s. And such kids don’t fail to notice that most of the time we actually say the word “talent,” we are referring to particular talents, talents that imply a destiny in the adult world. These talents, of course, are not for everyone.

Sometime in sixth grade, I became determined to make myself a comic book artist. I bought the official Marvel Comics drawing guide and set about learning how to draw superheroes with all of the self-discipline I could muster. Slowly, I got better at drawing. Just as slowly, I began to realize that I was nowhere near good enough to draw comic book-quality figures. Perspective and foreshortening baffled me, noses and hands destroyed my erasers and, generally, I was unable to force the pictures in my mind out onto the page. I gave it up, more or less, sometime in eighth grade.

During those two years of self-imposed study, talent became a slippery concept for me. I did not enter my study already convinced of my over-riding talent for the art. Maybe I thought the little jet-fighters I often sketched in my notebook suggested an inner talent—perhaps still latent—that foreshadowed my future as a comic book artist. After two years of purposeful practice, I could draw better than I had ever been able to. I also knew that I was nowhere near good enough for Marvel Comics. It was not that the notion became impossible to me. Rather, as I learned what little I did about drawing, I began to understand just how much more I still had to learn. My sense of what I still did not know outpaced what I felt I had learned. I knew people, younger than me, who seemed to have unconsciously mastered artistic skills that still escaped my grasp. Gradually, I began to see representational art as a talent I did not possess, a head start I did not have. Gradually, I wanted to do other things with my life. Gradually, I let the soft pencils go.

When I started teaching, I began to see how much those two years of fruitless questing had been worth, and I ceased to regret my failure. I hadn’t learned to draw like I wanted to, but it was enough to impress my new students when I need to do a quick sketch in English class. Something had stayed—the vestiges of abandoned training, something still worthwhile. I was only a teacher doing his best to muster a decent sketch, but what struck me was that some students saw my efforts as evidence of artistic talent. Whatever it is, I told them, it’s not talent. No, I learned this from hard work and failure—and thank goodness for it.

For me, the nature of talent has become more elusive with time. I began practicing drawing thinking of talent as both something I might have and something I didn’t actually need, as long as I had the will to learn. Two years later, my will had weakened in proportion to what I had learned, and talent now seemed the necessary and missing ingredient. A decade after that, however, what I had learned about drawing was more valuable to me than the faded dream of a career at Marvel Comics. Talent, though, had begun to seem more like a pernicious concept than a natural gift. Why should my students see my meager doodles as evidence of talent, the very thing for lack of which I had quit practicing? After all, I never drew anything that wasn’t the result of mere practice. I began to wonder, if we can disagree so much on the nature of artistic talent, why do we bother with the idea at all?

Drawing is one example of how the weight of the word “talent” does not fall equally on all activities. Certain pursuits are best accompanied by a heavy dose of talent, while others require practice alone. In some cases, the difference makes sense: it takes more talent to handle a trumpet than it does to collect the garbage, perhaps, though both activities can be done well. We are more likely to remark on the talent involved in the former, however. In such an absurd example, the distinction may seem too obvious. Let’s makes some more realistic comparisons between talents and the mere mastery of tasks. Specifically, let’s look at those activities that a school is bound to promote.

Is there a talent for the study of history that is equal to the talent for music? Can one have a talent for Earth Studies in the same way that she has a talent for the visual arts? How comparable is athletic talent to clerical talent? These are, of course, the wrong questions. Far be it of me to continue the reification of this shadowy concept. No, let me ask, instead: When do our students hear us use the word “talent?” What is the context of its use and what, most importantly, do our kids infer about talent from what we say? This meaning of talent—the meaning deduced by our students from what they hear—is the one that matters most.

Beginning at the latest in middle school, students are expected to demonstrate mastery of a range of subjects. Often, these are divided into major subjects—math, English, science and history—and other subjects—art, music and physical education. I’ll bet my stake in conventional wisdom that the word talent is heard much more frequently with regards to the last three subjects than it is to the others. Indeed, talent could almost serve as the legal difference between major subjects and the rest: Major subjects do not involve talent in the same sense that art, music and athletics do. The distinction is a legal one because, in many cases, students are only required to pass their major subjects to be promoted to the next grade. It is fair for an institution to require all students to master math and social studies, if for no other reason that everybody else had to do the same thing. Music, arts and athletics, on the other hand, are activities for which great inequities exist between people, activities where talent goes a long, long way. It may be fair to force us all to go to school to learn to read, but is it fair to make us learn to sight-read sheet music? Foreshorten an outstretched arm on a piece of paper? Hit five in a row from the free-throw line? Is it fair to have universal expectations in those areas where nature herself has so arbitrarily sprinkled the blessings of talent?

I once heard an art teacher say, within earshot of her students, that she had always had a talent for art. Other than that she seemed like a nice woman, but I can’t imagine a more destructive thing for an art teacher to say. Even if it’s the truth.

More on this can of worms later. . .