students – Stumbling with Confidence

Arts Education: banished beyond the Debatable Hills?

We have replaced wonder with tick-box excellence, and mystery with an impact case study.

If you collect the many dozens of articles written in the last few years about the state and future of the arts in education and place them on a pair of positive/negative scales, there’d be very little – if anything – on the positive side.

Thinking about this I was reminded of a book I read years ago, which remains one of my favourite books (it’s also on Neil Gaiman’s list of all-time favourites, so I’m in good company). The book is called Lud-in-the-Mist, written in 1926 by Hope Mirrlees. Mirrlees was a classicist, and much of her work dealt with the contested boundaries of Art and Life.

In Lud-in-the-Mist there are two countries. There is the land of Dorimare, a nation of stolid burghers, merchants and artisans. A rather prim and very proper place, where everyone knows their place, where the motto is essentially, ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ , and where the arts are relegated to activities such as needlework and country dancing: pursuits for the refinement of gentlewomen and gentlemen.

On the border of Dorimare, however, on the other side of the Debatable Hills, lies the land of Faerie, a strange, dark land full of mysteries and wonders…not all of them pleasant. The upright citizens of Dorimare so fear the land that lies beyond those dread hills, that the word ‘Faerie’ is never to be uttered.

Dorimare’s main city of Lud-in-the-Mist lies at the confluence of two rivers: the Dapple and the Dawl. The Dawl is like any other commercial river, but the Dapple happens to flow out of the land of Faerie, and brings with it fairy fruit, that is smuggled into Dorimare. Eating fairy fruit has a terrible effect: it causes people to start singing strange songs, to spout poetry, to dance with abandon. In other words, it turns them mad.

The plot revolves around the disappearance of a group of young ladies and the Mayor’s son who have been kidnapped and taken to the land of Faerie, and the attempt of the Mayor, a bumbling, self-important, rather fatuous man to rescue them. As a consequence of that quest, fundamental changes are wrought – to the Mayor and to Dorimare itself.

In Lud-in-the-Mist, Mirrlees is dealing with the division of the world into Apollonian and Dionysian aspects: the homely and the wild. There is also the long battle between Classicism and Romanticism, and Freud’s theories of the conscious and unconscious mind, and the relationship between terror and beauty.

The actor Mark Rylance, in an interview, said that the arts are essentially ‘mysterious’ which is why they frighten politicians and policy-makers, because they can’t control them, they can’t measure them.

I imagine the educational curriculum in Dorimare’s schools is very much what like the one demanded by Gradgrind in Dickens’ Hard Times;

“Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the mind of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.“

And if you think that’s rather extreme, consider this – handed to parents at a primary school in London in 2015:

‘The new programme of study in English is knowledge-based, this means its focus is on knowing facts rather than developing skills and understanding. It is also characterised by an increased emphasis on the technical aspects of language and less on the creative aspects.”

I was once asked, by the then German Federal Minister of Education as it happens, as we stood together in the queue for coffee at a conference on the future of Arts Education in Europe, what it was that had made the UK such a world leader in art, design, fashion, music , theatre, etc. He was comparing the UK with his own country and the fact that, with a few notable exceptions, Germany – with a relatively successful economy compared to the UK – had demonstrated nothing like that level of consistent creative output over the years.

I didn’t have a rigorously researched, evidence-based answer to give him, but I did say that I thought it had something to do with our long history and tradition of non-conformity, of sticking two fingers up to authority, and our high and genuine tolerance of eccentricity. Neither of which, I suggested humbly, were common attributes in his own country.

The Minister said ‘Ah, that’s very interesting’…and moved on.

I was thinking about Lud-in-the-Mist because it seems to me we are increasingly living in a country which is becoming more Dorimare-like by the day, where the arts are increasingly banished to the equivalent of the land of Faerie, where creativity is associated with the creation of goods and wealth, where any hint of an artistic or genuinely creative spirit is dismissed as bad influence, and to be actively discouraged and eliminated.

In our education system there is now a very real danger of replacing genuine creativity with skills acquisition, wonder with tick-box excellence, and mystery with an impact case study.

So, how might we truly embrace the arts and our creative non-conformists, eccentrics and mavericks, or are we fated to banish them, their works and deeds, to that strange, mysterious, wonderful land beyond the Debatable Hills?

The final, celebratory chapter of Lud-in-the-Mist provides the answer.

On history and all that (Part 2): a marvellous lesson

I was once privileged to witness the most marvellous history lesson…taught by a drama teacher.

It was in a comprehensive school. The students, a mixed class of girls and boys, were taking GCSE History, and the theme was England in the 17th century. The ‘teacher’ was Dorothy Heathcote, the eminent and inspirational drama education specialist. (For those who have never heard of her, do read this http://www.mantleoftheexpert.com/community/about-us/dorothy-heathcote/.)

One of the things Dorothy used to say was that the most powerful word in education is the word ‘might’. Ask a child “what IS the answer to this?” pre-supposes there is a single ‘right’ answer. It’s a closed question. But ask “what MIGHT be the answer to this?”, then you open up the possibilities, the curiosity, the imagination.

The environment was a standard classroom, with melamine tables and plastic chairs.

The session started with Dorothy hanging three large blank sheets of paper on the wall. On the top of one she wrote: ‘I know this about the 17th century’. On the second she wrote ‘I think I know this about the 17th century’. On the third she wrote ‘I’d like to know this about the 17th century’.

She then asked the students to fill out each paper. Not a great deal went on the first one. A bit more went on the second one. A quite a bit more on the third one.

Dorothy then quickly went through each one, checking to see if there was any more to be added.

She then asked the students to get into groups of two or three, and gave each group a set of photocopied sheets of paper. They were taken from one of those guides to antique furniture, and contained images and information about 17th century tables and chairs

Dorothy asked each group to look at the images and read the information, and then to select one – either a table or chair.

She then announced that from that moment on the classroom was now Heathcote’s Expert Antique Restoration Workshop. The students were now all experts at restoring antique furniture, and she was in charge. She then, pointing to the classroom tables and chairs, asked the workers to start restoring the piece of furniture they had selected.

Notwithstanding a bit of embarrassed bewilderment, the students started to ‘work’ on their chosen item: inspecting it, discussing what might be wrong with it, what needed repairing, starting to repair it, etc.

Dorothy walked round inspecting the work, and would ask questions. A typical exchange would be as follows:

Dorothy: What have you got there?

Student: It’s an oak dining chair, Miss.

D: Where’s it from?

S: Something Hall, Miss. I think it’s one of those big houses. [they’d read that on the sheet]

D: What’s wrong with it?

S: Er…it’s got a big split. [that wasn’t on the sheet]

D: Any idea how that split might have occurred?

S: Not sure, Miss. But there’s some scorch marks around the split, so we reckon it was in a fire and perhaps got chucked out of a window. [definitely not on the sheet!]

D: And how do you reckon that might have happened?

And you could see the students’ imagination switch into gear, and out came stories about corridors, and candles, and late night trysts, and a chase, and a dropped candle, and the panic, and the servants being woken up and being ordered to save the furniture, and the chair being thrown out of a high window….

Each group created and shared its own story, using what they knew, what they thought they knew, and what they imagined. And slowly but surely, a real sense of 17th century life began to be created and understood.

After a short break, the session re-started. Now two new characters were introduced along with a set of typical everyday ’17th century’ artifacts e.g: a ring, a quill and ink, a bell, a hand written letter, a pamphlet, etc. The characters – played by actors – were the lady of the house, and a male servant. Each sat at each end of the room, and the students – moving between the two – could ask them questions about their lives, and about the various artifacts which they could touch and examine, each of which had a story attached to it.

As in the first session, layer upon layer of knowledge and understanding gradually was created.

At the end of the session, Dorothy returned to the three sheets of paper, and once more asked the students to fill them in. This time round, what had been the sparsely filled ‘I know this…’ sheet was now filled – confidently and, in some cases, passionately – with information.

The obvious lesson, from this history lesson, was that it’s our natural curiosity about people, our ability to imagination the world through a different pair of eyes, and our love of stories, that powers our understanding of history. Facts and chronologies, of themselves, do not an understanding of history make. But engendering curiosity, imagination and, indeed, passion, might well encourage the pursuit of the factual.

The Elixir of Wonder

Yesterday I spent the morning discussing future strategies and scenarios in higher education. What struck me was that over the course of three hours the words education, teaching, and learning were never used.

In the evening I was a guest at the opening night of the Royal Northern College of Music’s production of Donizetti’s opera ‘The Elixir of Love’ to be sung in Italian and featuring – in the cast and orchestra – students from right across the undergraduate and post-graduate provision.

I have to admit that opera generally – and particularly early 19th century Italian comic opera – does not feature on my list of favourite ‘must see’ genres. In fact it’s probably well along the ‘must avoid’ end of the continuum. However, I’d been invited by colleagues I like and respect, and there was a pre-show dinner at the RNCM’s excellent restaurant.

There was a full house, so the building was humming. There’s something great about that pre-show foyer buzz as people arrive, meet, greet, drink, chat, etc. As Richard Schechner pointed out many years ago, the trouble with too many shows is that what happens in the foyer, bars and social spaces before, at the interval, and after a show is all too frequently the most interesting phenomena of the evening.

We took our seats as the orchestra tuned up. Again there’s that wonderful expectancy as the various instruments tune in to that plaintive A on the oboe.

Then it was curtain up and straight into what, from the start to the finish, was a hugely enjoyable, visually seductive and witty, brilliantly performed and played production. 24 hours later, as I write this, I am still smiling because of it.

However this is not a review of the production. But rather, thinking back to my rather dry and ‘education-free’ meeting – about higher education – in the morning, a reflection on how our much disparaged and ‘useless’ disciplines of dance, drama and music in education (all present in this production) provide opportunities for students and also staff to engage in the creation of truly wonderful work. This is something that too many of those who are in control of our education systems, with their obsessions with protocols and standardisation and compliance and conformity and league tables and graduate employability and sustainability and an infinite host of other -isations and -ilities, just don’t get!

I’ve written before how our obsession with the somewhat triumphalist notion of ‘excellence’ has blinded us to that which is so obvious about genuine, transformative education: it’s not excellence we should be pursuing…it is wonder-full education.

The RNCM show provided that Elixir of Wonder.