6/12 Presentations

The topics of the presentations today were particulary of my interest because they were about food and creative arts in education. I used to have a great interest in food when I was studying sports nutrition and training. The problems America, Australia, England, and other western countries face is enormous; the food quality is rubbish. The culprit in the increase in obesity rates is sugar, not fat. The government in the U.S. in, I think it was the 1970s, sent out a message saying that fat was evil when in fact sugar was the culprit of people getting bigger. I really think that a lot of things are messed up and corrupted in America, and food is one of the issues that has turned into a major problem that cannot be fixed easily.

The quote from Picasso goes as follows: "All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up." I agree with this quote and I think that modern education kills creativity, as Ken Robinson said in his TED speech a few years back. The implementation of the arts in education is definetly a great thing, but in Japan I don't think it would be as effective as in other western countries. Japan has cultural aspects which would not correspond well with arts in education. First, Japanese value grades from standardized testing, but creative things cannot be measured by numbers. If they are, I feel that creativeness is lost in the process. Second, Japanese people tend not to express their feelings. This goes against the self expression that is supposed to happen when creating art. If it is in the form of drawing, perhaps students would be able to better express themselves because those forms of arts are not directly seen by peers. However, forms of art like dance are direct shapes of their body, therfore one can predict that Japanese students will become uncomfortable. I think it is extremely difficult to implement creative arts effectively in the education system in Japan (or in any country actually.) The only way for this to happen is for the paradigm to change, which will not happen easily. In the future there may become a time when the people realize that modern education is ineffective in embracing creativity and real knowledge and skills, not just undigested crammed information.