WE read with great interest Wong Chun Wai’s opinion on the outgoing education minister, “Paying the price for ignoring the master” (The Star, Jan 3) but were surprised by his position on the role of arts in the future of the world: “The world has evolved and those with an arts background were not going to bring our children forward to prepare them for a world of artificial intelligence (AI), coding and robotics.”We strongly disagree with this broad and unfounded statement and would like to point out how the world has been moving towards including more arts educators and arts education into the formal syllabus in schools. In the Second Unesco World Congress on Arts Education (2010), arts education is affirmed as “the foundation for balanced creative, cognitive, emotional, aesthetic and social development of children, youth and life-long learners”. There is also expanding research on how the learning of science is promoted using artistic and creative means.
Moving into the new year, we believe opinions about a dichotomy between science and arts are not useful. For example, a common definition of AI is the development of what is normally called human intelligence such as “visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages”. All these are a combination of the arts and sciences.
