Being Correct vs. Being Truthful

There is a difference between being correct and being truthful.

Being correct means doing something right. You do a math problem correctly. You spell a word correctly. You measure something correctly. You drive down the street correctly.

And, you answer the questions on a standardized test correctly in order to get the best score.

Knowing how to do things correctly is like having a toolbox. And that toolbox is used for telling the truth.

If you know how to do calculations correctly, then you can tell truths about our world, like what it takes to get a rocket to the moon or how fast a population of animals is declining. Sometimes this gets you in trouble, like if you are Galileo.

If you know how to write correctly, you can make yourself understood when you tell stories or write poetry or report the news. Lots of people have gotten in trouble for telling the truth in their writing. Mark Twain would know about that.

If you know how to operate a movie camera correctly, you can use it to get the shots you need to make your movie.

So, being correct and being truthful are connected. Even though it's not that exciting to sit there and get some questions correct on a test - if doing those problems correctly lets you do something that matters to you, to do something that is true, that's exciting.

This is where the arts come in.

Art is telling truth about who we are and how we see our worlds - real and imagined. There are many media, from painting to comic books to movies and sculpture and more, that we can use to do this. So when we train in a particular medium, we are learning how to do it correctly so that the sculpture stands up or the painting lasts or the graphic novel shows the scene as we want it to appear or the carving in the pyramid remains visible.

The great thing about the arts, though, is that there is truth from the beginning. The way a person makes marks on a paper has truth in it, about that person and how they make marks. The way a person dances is very individual, even if it's clumsy or silly or robotic. Sometimes that's a truth we'd rather our date did not reveal.

So, the arts are about releasing the truths that we have within us. This is incredibly important to young people, who need to be seen and heard and understood and who can often feel ignored by the grownup world.

So while it's important to discover truths outside of us through the sciences, it is also important to release the truths within us through the arts. The two are inseparable. We should teach our kids to do things correctly, but we must also teach them that it is their right to tell the truth.