On Explaining the Obvious

As any parent of school-age children knows these days, public education has become more of an attempt to quantify "education" according to standards set by some National organization instead of determining what they might be capable of doing.  I don't necessarily object to the first approach so long as a good-faith effort is made to give children the necessary basic tools to do well in these evaluations, but one of the problems I do have with this approach is evident in the following article:  Music-prodigies-math-prodigies.

While the premise has some intrigue to it, there is really and truly nothing that can be done with this information, and that's precisely my objection to it.  We sometimes spend so much time disassembling something that at the end of it, we are left with a handful of parts and no better sense of how it worked (other than it did work, but now it doesn't) and definitely no better clue as to why it worked the way it did...the why of something may be more important than anything else...not to figure out or quantify, but to appreciate for what it is and its uniqueness.

As someone schooled in both the arts and sciences, I had no problem keeping separate in my thought processes things that could be answered quantitatively and those that did not have to be or could be answered that way.  I also had no problem knowing which answer "group" to assign for a particular problem.  Perhaps it was because I took enough classes in music theory, composition, harmonic/structural analysis, counterpoint, and orchestration to understand the mechanics of music and know that regardless of a work's technical merit, it lacked any sense of life or spirit unless it transcended its limitations through artistic expression and context.  There may be an enormous difference between a scale played awkwardly and tentatively by a newcomer to an instrument and what Yo-Yo Ma can toss off in tuning onstage with his Silk Road Ensemble, but to a child and his/her parents, the former could be miraculous and blissful moment as well.

My point is this: we spend way too much time wanting comprehensive proof these days.  When it comes to the arts, some things are best appreciated instead of analyzed. When trying to figure out if a prodigy has a brain structure and thought process different from a different discipline, it may be better to just accept it to be true, that it is a blessing or mystery, and move on.  If we insist on disassembling everything in our lives, we may be left at the end with just a bunch of parts and no better idea of how it worked or why it worked that way.

There is something to be said about believing in the magic of everyday life and the way ordinary things can become special if we just took the time to appreciate them in whatever way is necessary to allow their uniqueness to become evident.