Does Education Need a Renaissance in Qualitative Thinking?

Continuing my inquiry from the last post . . . I believe that the education community will not unlock the secrets to creating innovative thinkers through data-driven approaches. I believe that data certainly has its place and that schools should be collecting evidence about how well their strategies are working, but a culture focusing solely on quantitative data will make only incremental progress. Clearly, that will not be enough to meet the challenges ahead.

Policy leaders need to stop demanding numbers to justify all their decisions. Yes, qualitative data is hard to acquire and analyze. But where would our world be without decisions based on standing back and looking at the whole, making intuitive leaps because mystery beckons?

For true innovation to occur in schools, those who are pursuing a transformation in education must cultivate within themselves qualities of mind that we often call "artistic"—qualities like wonder, apprehension of beauty, embrace of mystery, exploration of possibilities, and fanciful reverie. Scientific progress and innovative breakthroughs draw from those qualities.

I believe that arts experiences can be incubators for those qualities—perhaps not what most schools call arts education today but a true artistic community whose views and ideas are taken as seriously as those of DaVinci were. Look at our world. Art is everywhere. It is highly influential. But because we do not study art in depth—arts classes are about getting results to show that kids are becoming better performers, not about the artistic process—we don't understand those influences or even consciously know they exist.