I recently read a book that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.
It's called The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game by University of Utah Philosophy Professor C. Thi Nguyen.
The book discusses at length something we are continuously doing: finding ways to measure what we do, and using that as justification for why we do it.
Nguyen challenges us to question what happens when the way we measure something shifts our attention from pursuit to outcome, and poses a more crucial question of whether we are even measuring the right things in the first place.
I've started to see this everywhere.
We live in a world increasingly motivated by data.
Nearly every institution is asked: What is the return on investment? What can be counted? What can be quantified?
A case can certainly be made for why measurement and accountability matter. But I believe that our obsession to easily quantify everything is quite problematic.
Because, for one, the way we measure something eventually changes the way we understand its value.
We have built scoreboards for almost everything. And once something has a scoreboard, we start playing to the score. In the process we have naturally also decided on what constitutes a point; in effect why to play the game in the first place.
We start asking questions like: What is the measurable outcome? What was the economic impact? What workforce need does it fill? What kind of salary can someone expect if they pursue this field?
But are these actually the things we should be measuring?
I think we've made a foundational error. We have put the cart before the horse, and started valuing the outcome more than the pursuit.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in what is happening to the study of the humanities in this country, and in particular, in our own backyard.
We are watching history, philosophy, literature, languages, religion, and the creative arts being pushed to the margins of education, or cut entirely.
There is a growing pressure to justify education solely through workforce outcomes, to produce workers.
I'm not arguing against people learning trades or developing practical skills. Those things do matter.
But when developing a workforce becomes the primary and only measure of what education is for, have we perhaps missed the point? At least in higher ed, should there not be a distinction between training and educating?
Education should not simply prepare people to work.
It should prepare people to live.
To think. To question. To understand history. To wrestle with complicated ideas, and connect the cumulative knowledge of past generations to future ones.
That is precisely what the humanities do.
What we're seeing is bigger than budget cuts or changing curricula. We are witnessing a systematic devaluing of the humanities.
These subject matters are complex and messy, just like us. They can’t be easily quantified, they can’t be neatly measured, and thus, they have been deemed to have no value.
And the arts have something particularly important to teach us about this breakdown.
Artists understand that the pursuit is the point.
An artist's joy isn't necessarily in the finished artwork. It's in making it, in experimenting, struggling, failing, discovering, and following an idea somewhere unexpected.
The finished product is almost beside the point.
The creation is the point.
The discovery is the point.
But our institutions increasingly evaluate everything by the end product. There is a significant and important difference between creating and producing. Should we really be producing graduates?
In his book, Nguyn rightly points out that, to fit neatly into a spreadsheet, we have to oversimplify almost everything. And when we become focused on numbers for numbers’ sake, we hollow out the meaning. We flatten complexity. We strip away the very purpose of the thing we’re supposedly trying to value.
And let me be clear: The arts and humanities demonstrate enormous measurable outcomes.
The arts create jobs, generate economic activity, bring people to a place, contribute to education, build community, and improve quality of life.
Similarly, the humanities as a whole cultivate the self, shape character, deepen our understanding of ourselves and others, and expand our capacity to see beyond our own perspective.
There is plenty of evidence. There are plenty of numbers to back it up.
So why do we constantly find ourselves having to prove it?
I don't think the arts have a measurement problem. I think we have a values problem.
We've become so focused on measuring what is immediately useful to the powers that be, that we've started confusing those measurements with value itself.
Economic impact should be evidence of value, not the prerequisite for having value.
We don't measure a friendship by its economic impact. We don't decide whether a song mattered based on how many jobs it created. We don't measure the importance of a conversation by its ROI.
Some things have value simply because they make our lives richer, deeper, and more human.
When we become so focused on measuring what is immediately useful, and employable, and we stop investing in the things that help people think and question, we may become very efficient at producing workers while becoming increasingly poor at fostering and inspiring human beings.
Is that a worthwhile trade off?
Maybe the question isn't whether the arts and humanities can prove their value.
Maybe the question is whether we've remembered what value actually means.
What we measure tells us what we value.
And what we value ultimately shapes the lives we build.
Perhaps we've spent so much time pinpointing the destination that we've forgotten something fundamental:
The pursuit is the point.
——-
Elizabeth Pappas is Executive Director of the Art Center of Burlington.
The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of Tri States Public Radio or its license holder, Western Illinois University.
Diverse viewpoints are welcomed and encouraged.