Igor Konovalov
In a free market, companies spend big bucks on research and development to stay ahead of their competitors and to increase profits. However, governments also spend millions, if not billions, on science, culture and education. This balance between corporations and governments stimulates innovations and streamlines economies, for example by educating future employees. But is the government actually playing the right role, if any role at all? And what should this role even be?
During the 2008 recession, many organizations and corporations had to find ways to save money or work more efficient. During this time, the Dutch government decided to cut heavily on budgets for the cultural sector, to force organizations to work more efficiently. Although it is fair to reduce funding for culture, given that loads of subsidies for many other sectors were also cut back, the culture sector was not the most popular destination for government money to begin with. I find this strange, since culture is said to be one of the corner stones of civilization.
In ancient times, history shows that culture flourished in empires like that of the Roman, Greek or Persian. Although one could argue that these empires were vastly wealthy and therefore had money to spare to build monuments and libraries, I think it is the other way around.
Recent research has shown that culture, be it music, dance, art or more, stimulates intelligence. People that have learned to play an instrument in their youth have for example less problem with learning a foreign language and are generally more creative and more self-confident. Visiting art expositions stimulates critical thinking in less black and white terms and therefore enhancing people’s capabilities to create more creative connections in their thinking. And nothing improves one’s capability to express oneself than learning to dance. In short, culture as a whole has a great impact on education and intelligence, children and adults alike.
Unfortunately, governments nowadays tend to limit spending on the creative industries and send most of the funding to companies and organizations that only reach out to very large groups and that create big revenue on the short run. This short-sighted thinking smothers chances to improve a civilization on the long run. Structural funding for every aspect of the cultural and creative industries should be seen as the baseline to further economic and social development for society as a whole.
There is a surplus of research stating the benefits of stimulating creativity and culture. However, I highly recommend the video from TED-Ed: “how playing an instrument benefits your brain”. It perfectly illustrates the point of stimulating culture and music education.