Art is Not About Grading; It Is the Ultimate Antidote to Life’s Rat Race

Many parents, when discussing their children’s education, find themselves most conflicted over art classes. There is a pervasive pattern: children start with immense passion for painting or music, but as they advance in grade, parents begin to calculate. Does painting help with college admissions? Does music add points to a score? If not, the decision is made to cut it immediately to save time for mathematics drills or English vocabulary. In the common mindset, art is a mere ornament, a superficial addition, or what some call the usefulness of the useless. However, I want to tell you that planning a child’s life with this logic is employing a dangerous form of risk management; it is effectively performing a subtraction on the child’s future.

I am finsages, a financial veteran who has spent thirty years navigating the trenches of banking risk management. Throughout my career, I have audited tens of thousands of enterprises. I have seen countless companies with pristine balance sheets that were hollow inside, and I have encountered hidden champions who seemed uncompetitive yet possessed the resilience to traverse entire economic cycles. Today, I want to discuss aesthetic education and taste from the perspective of an auditor.

In financial auditing, assets are divided into tangible and intangible. Tangible assets are easy to calculate: factories, equipment, cash—all transparent. But what truly determines whether a company survives in this era are often the intangible assets that cannot be quantifiably priced—brand equity, corporate culture, or top-level strategic intuition. These assets may appear as zero on a balance sheet, yet they constitute the most formidable moat.

Aesthetic education and taste are, in essence, the most core intangible assets of a human life.

You might ask, how can aesthetic ability become a moat? We must examine our current atmospheric system. We live in an era of precise algorithmic calculation. Modern apps are essentially a massive iron curtain of computing power. Through data analysis, they know what you like, when you will purchase, and even your current emotional fluctuations. In this environment, human behavior is becoming instrumentalized. We are pushed into narrow information cocoons, conditioned for fast-paced stimulation and standardized answers.

Under the calculation of the algorithm, it is easy for a person to become a highly efficient cog. If you raise a child who possesses only efficient computational ability, they will face a brutal reality in the AI era: every skill they excel at will fall within the evolutionary coverage of AI. Calculation, logical reasoning, and data analysis are AI’s strengths. If a person’s competitiveness is built solely on efficiency, they are competing against a machine that never tires and has near-zero costs. This is akin to attempting to win in a saturated red ocean market by simply increasing overtime hours; this is not competitiveness, it is self-attrition.

What, then, is irreplaceable by a machine? It is beauty, poetry, and that quality of perception that cannot be quantified or dismantled.

I recall a fascinating case from twenty years ago in the credit approval office. It involved a high-end home design firm. The owner had the typical temperament of an artist—he understood little of financial statements, and to many banks, his management appeared chaotic and inefficient. However, upon observing his products, I discovered he had constructed a powerful aesthetic identity. His clients were not buying furniture; they were buying a lifestyle, a form of spiritual solace. During a period of severe industry contraction, many larger, more efficient firms that expanded via low pricing collapsed. He alone survived. His clients held a loyalty based on aesthetics. This loyalty did not require discounts to maintain because it touched the deepest human longing for beauty.

This is the power of taste. It transforms a person from a tool into a whole human being.

Many parents equate art education with certification levels. They believe attaining a Level 10 certificate is success. To put it bluntly, certification is the instrumentalization of art. It turns aesthetic education into another form of rote drilling, another competition of efficiency. This is the greatest fallacy of aesthetic education. The true purpose of art education is absolutely not to make a child a professional painter or musician, but to grant them eyes that discover beauty and a heart that remains soft.

You can analogize aesthetic ability to a form of social security for the spirit. During prosperous times, you may not feel its presence; it generates no direct cash flow. But when you enter a period of contraction—when you face a mid-life crisis or profound emptiness and exhaustion—this ability is activated. It allows a child, facing a tedious and oppressive life, to achieve rapid self-healing through a painting, a piece of music, or a gaze at the sunset.

This is a critical survival skill, which I call spiritual self-healing capacity.

If you fill all of a child’s time with utilitarian learning, you are turning their life into a high-leverage speculative gamble. You are betting that they can enter a certain social stratum through competition, but you ignore the fact that if they lose the ability to perceive beauty during the climb, they may reach the peak only to find themselves in deep spiritual poverty. They will possess top-tier material assets but lose the ability to define happiness.

This is like a company that expands rapidly in scale but lacks internal cultural cohesion, relying solely on KPIs. Such a company appears strong, but upon external shock, it disintegrates rapidly because it lacks a shared value anchor that transcends mere profit.

In my book, The Human Algorithm, I discussed in detail how humans driven by algorithms drift toward entropy—a state of disordered chaos and spiritual exhaustion. Taste, conversely, is a form of negative entropy. It brings a sense of order to a chaotic life and injects fresh oxygen into a parched soul.

Therefore, please do not cut a child’s artistic dreams simply because a hobby does not add points to a score.

When you tell a child that painting is useless, you are telling them that in this world, only things that can be quantified and converted into profit have value. Once this logic is implanted, a child may become very successful, but they will struggle to be happy. This is because happiness itself is non-quantifiable.

True aesthetic education provides a child the opportunity to maintain a free enclave outside the walls of the algorithm. There, there are no correct answers, no grading standards, only their authentic feeling toward the world. This feeling is the only spark that can keep them warm in the cold competition of society.

Some parents may say they want to support their child but do not know how to guide them. It is simple: do not ask if the painting looks realistic, do not ask what award they won. Instead, ask, What did you feel when you were painting this tree? What emotion do you think this color represents? Guide them to feel, not to complete.

We should not cultivate a piano-playing machine, but a person who can still be moved by a flower or a breeze under pressure. This softness is not a weakness; it is the highest form of strength. Only those with a soft heart possess true inclusivity and creativity.

In physics, the hardest diamond is actually formed by carbon atoms arranged in a specific structure. The strength of a life does not lie in armoring oneself like a piece of steel, but in possessing an inner world deep enough to accommodate solitude and resist nihilism.

I am reminded of the ancient wisdom regarding the pursuit of a quiet mind to achieve far-reaching goals. This stillness is actually a high-level aesthetic state. Only when we can step outside utilitarian calculations and examine life in tranquility can we truly see the direction.

In this fast-paced era, we are too accustomed to pursuing evolutionary power, stronger computing power, and faster iterations. But I wish to remind you: the endpoint of evolutionary power should not be to become a more perfect tool, but to return to the essence of being human.

Aesthetic education is, in fact, a return. It makes us realize that humans were not born to be quantified. We came into this world not just to survive, but to live. Survival is physical; living is aesthetic.

If you can allow your child to retain a slight obsession with beauty during their growth, they will possess a broader horizon and deeper insight than others, regardless of their future industry. An architect with taste can build a house with a soul; a manager with taste can construct an organization with warmth; a trader with taste can perceive the emotional truth behind market fluctuations.

This ability is the intangible asset I mentioned—unquantifiable yet vital. At some future moment, when the child needs strength most, it will transform into a powerful spiritual support, protecting their soul from being instrumentalized.

So, allow your child to doodle on a canvas, to daydream in a music room, or even to spend an afternoon observing an ant. These moments, which utilitarians view as a waste of time, are actually the most valuable appreciation processes on the balance sheet of their life.

Finally, I leave you with this thought: in future competition, computing power will become cheaper, but perceptive power will become more expensive. May our children not only have the speed to win at the starting line but also the soul to appreciate the starry sky at the finish line.

As the ancients taught, only by remaining true to one’s original intention can the ultimate goal be achieved. This original intention is our primal pursuit of beauty and the pure joy of existence. In this era where computing power obscures the sky, may you and your children guard that enclave called taste, and live with poetic depth amidst the mundane noise of life.

The world is magnificent; I will see you at the summit.