The Amputation of Imagination

Too many boys walk away from art classes with their imaginations amputated at the knee, rejecting not the thing itself but the pallid version they were handed.

Photo by Stephanie LeBlanc

The story starts in the uninspired rectangle of a classroom—walls the color of institutional defeat, ceilings spattered with the dreams of yesteryear’s freshmen. Here, in the great mechanical procession of requirements and credit hours, where creativity is processed and portioned like government cheese, we find the modern American high school “Fine Arts Program”—a phrase so vague and neutered it hardly retains meaning, let alone promise. Within this intellectual cattle chute, you will find boys—disaffected, disengaged, bewildered—muttering under their breath while attempting to sketch their hands for the fourth time this month, as if repetition were revelation. Somewhere, someone decided this was “art,” the sine qua non of creative fulfillment, and the gate through which all young souls must squeeze if they wish to meet their diploma-makers on the other side.

The system, such as it is, demands boxes be checked. Fine arts? Check. One semester, two if you’re lucky (or cursed, depending on perspective). A program nominally championing creativity gets crammed into the same bureaucratic compartment as Health, Personal Finance, and Introduction to Spreadsheet Management. Who needs imagination when you can have Excel proficiency? And still, we might tolerate the mandated exposure to beauty, to culture, to the transcendent if such exposure were worthy of its name. But no: our schools, dazzled by modern priorities—STEM, coding bootcamps, dual-credit calculus, student-athletes chased down the corridors by the specter of scholarships—have relegated fine arts programs to a skeleton crew operating on borrowed time and scavenged budgets. Even as they atrophy, the remaining offerings, threadbare and narrow, ensure that only the daintiest, safest definitions of “art” make it past the committee room.

Boys, as always, bear the brunt of this particular folly. To them, art has been reduced to brushstrokes and pastels, watercolor washes of flowers in bloom, charcoal sketches of still life (always the same apples and oranges, as though creativity itself has run out of fruit). Feminized in presentation, shrinking from anything tactile, physical, or rugged, this version of art leaves young men adrift in their own boredom. And so they shrug: I’m just not good at art. Art’s not for me. And with that, we watch the slow extinguishing of the creative instinct—an instinct that once inspired men to build soaring cathedrals, to carve marble into forms so lifelike they seem ready to breathe, to master the crafts of masonry, glass, wood, and steel.

Imagine instead a different classroom. No hands drawn ad nauseam. Instead, there’s architecture—a boy’s eyes widening as he learns the principles of the Doric column, the divine mathematics behind Brunelleschi’s dome. Imagine a workshop alive with the sound of chisels striking stone, sawdust hanging like incense in the air as boys learn the ancient rhythms of woodworking, rediscovering a craft passed down for generations but forgotten in the age of plastic and prefab. Or, better yet, a stained-glass studio where colored shards are cut and soldered into luminous windows that tell stories older than the written word. This is art—not just representation, but creation, the marrying of mind, heart, and hand.

And what of the future? Why not invite boys (and girls, too) into the dynamic realm of “Creator Technologies,” a program that bridges the analog and the digital, training students to design, invent, and build? Show them how technology, too often a tool of passive consumption, can become the medium for great works of human expression. In doing so, we might rescue art—and creativity itself—from its sleepy stupor, breathing new life into the foundational idea of what it means to “make.”

Instead, we’re killing it—slowly, methodically—by chaining it to narrow definitions, rote exercises, and indifference. Too many boys walk away from art with their imaginations amputated at the knee, rejecting not the thing itself but the pallid version they were handed. And so we ask, desperately, why? Why would we do this to them? To ourselves? To a culture that already teeters on the edge of a spiritual vacancy so total it might as well be a black hole?

Creativity doesn’t die overnight—it’s starved to death, bled dry of joy and wonder by sterile curriculums, cost-cutting administrations, and a collective failure to recognize what art is: life itself. If we continue along this path, we deserve exactly what we’ll get—empty cities, empty hearts, empty lives. But there is still time to change. Throw out the gatekeepers. Let the boys build. Let them create. Let them become.

Michael S. Rose is author of the New York Times bestseller Goodbye, Goodmen (Regnery), Ugly As Sin (Sophia Institute), The Art of Being Human (Angelico), Benedict XVI: The Man Who Was Ratzinger (Spence), and other books.