The immediate context of this essay includes the author’s biography and when and where the essay was first published. The author, Yo-Yo Ma, was well educated at the Juilliard School and Harvard University where he became a professional cellist and songwriter. The essay was originally published in the World-Post, an online news and blog site. The essay was published the same month that the website was created and has some pretty powerful and influential contributors, such as Elon Musk and Tony Blair. What I noticed about the biography was that Ma must have been very good at writing since his essay was published in a start-up with such powerful contributors. I also found it odd at the same time since he was educated as a cellist and songwriter; although the topic he writes about, art, is by definition what he had studied.

The imposed context of this essay includes my personal reading experiences and the reason for reading this text in particular. I believe the reason I read this was to fully understand how much our educational systems have changed over time and that they have not been in the right direction. Also, as a student coming from a high school that recently changed into a STEM education model, I was quite in shock as to why this is not good and that we need to be incorporating a STEAM education model instead. I think I needed someone to put it in perspective for me because some have said how this was not a good thing. I never quite saw anything wrong with a STEM model, it seemed logical to me since the world has adapted to this model. While I’m sure that art can help better shape an individual, I’m not sure how you can teach students in middle and high school empathy. I don’t think Ma quite truly knows either, but he does have a few great starting points.

The internal context of the essay was in regards to rhetorical situations, the scope, and what exactly the point was. The situation here is that we are now teaching our children only the essentials to have a great career in today’s world. Not also giving them tools to be able to live and understand the world they live in. The scope of the essay is very, very wide. This is geared towards the educational system, and that’s a pretty big and daunting task. Yet, they are the ones incorporating the wrong educational model. Lastly, the whole point of writing this essay to was spread the word that this is wrong and that art, in it’s vast ways, does in fact have a meaningful influence in a child’s future. As Ma says, “The arts help us cope with these issues by engaging, not avoiding, the deep emotions of intimate loss involved and retelling over and over again the story of the human condition and its limits” (259). If we can’t understand the person sitting right next to us, then essentially we’re all just robots. And no one wants to live a life like that.

Three words that I needed to gloss in this essay were, Bandwidth, Antimatter, and Nonpartisan