The Arts vs Science Debate

During our lecture on the arts vs science debate we came up with two lists of things we related to science and the arts, below are a few ideas we came up with.

By people who don’t engage in either the arts and science are typically seen as polar opposites, which is the view I held before we looked at the arts vs science in this module. I viewed the arts as a way for people to express themselves and science as something technical and of logic. However it is argued that the arts and science aren’t that different at all. You can be creative through the arts as well as science, and both can be used to express yourself. I watched Mae Jemison’s tedtalk ‘Teach arts and sciences together’. Mae Jemison who was the first African-American woman to go into space is a great believer in the need for developing a new vision of learning that combines the arts and sciences. In her talk Mae expresses the importance of rejuvenating and joining the arts and science. She says that decisions are being made about society with the thought in mind that science and the arts are separate and she believes that this is going to cause problems for society in the future. She goes on to say that the arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity and that as humans it is our attempt to build an understanding of our universe. She states in her talk that science provides an understanding of a universal experience, and arts provide a universal understanding of a personal experience (Jemison, 2002).