17. OCT.

2011
PRESENTATIONS / TIMETABLE:
10:30 - 11:00 Review of texts 11:00 - 11:20 Darryl Clifton Design Area Leader + BA Illustration Course Director, Camberwell College of Arts Introduction: Education - current issues and challenges BREAK 11:40 - 12:00 Ken Robinson - TED talk International advisor on education in the arts Is education killing creativity? 12:00 - 12:30 Rhiannon James Director, Education & Professional Development at D&AD Relationships with industry and the development of an alternative or complimentary education programme LUNCH BREAK 13:00 - 14:30 Bethany Wells Fairground Collective - a collective of designers and architects actively involved with the design of sustainable communities Design, eduction and environment 14:30 - 15:00 Sophie Walters Directs the educational programme at onedotzero New models of engagement BREAK 15:15 - 15:45 Workshop A new Design University? 15:45 - 16:00 panel Q+A

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:
Illich, Ivan (1995) Deschooling Society. London: Marion Boyars Publishers Robinson, Ken (1995) The Element: How finding your passion changes everything. London: Penguin

COMPULSORY READING: Ivan Illich

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby schooled to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is schooled to accept service instead of value School appropriates the money, men and good will available for education and in addition discourages other institutions from assuming educational tasks. Work, leisure, politics, city living, and, even, family life depend on schools for the habits and knowledge they pre-suppose, instead of becoming themselves the means of education. School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age. The nation state has adopted it, drafting all citizens in to a graded curriculum leading to sequential diplomas not unlike the initiation rituals and hieratic promotions of former times A second major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching. Teaching, it is true, may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives most learning happens casually the de-schooling of society implies a recognition of the two faced nature of learning. An insistence on skill/drill alone could be a disaster, equal emphasis must be placed on other kinds of learning. But if schools are the wrong places for learning a skill, they are even worse places for getting an education. School does both tasks badly, partly because it does not distinguish between them. School is inefficient in skill instruction especially because it is curricular. From Ivan Illich De-schooling society http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=ivan+illich+deschooling+societ y&hl=en&as_sdt=O&as_vis=I&01&oi=scholart

Miscellaneous Quotes
Noam Chomsky says [paraphrased] That the educational system is one of indoctrination of the young a means of training people to be obedient, conformist, unthinking, un-critical and to remain passive. He claims that the system has stupity inbuilt, that it is a technique for selecting obedience, that it denies progress, that rather than nurturing creativity and independence they are squashed out in favour of standardization. He adds that educational systems are a means of control, limitation and the imposition of authority. Fidel Castro claimed that all Universities would be dissolved by 1980 since as all life in Cuba will be an education

It is too much to say that design ability can be taught. As with any other creative activity, it is a way of doing things that can only be grown into, perhaps but not necessarily in the context of a formal design education Potter, Norman (2009) What is a designer? Things, Places, Messages London: Hyphen Press

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living. Buckminster Fuller quoted in: Elizabeth Barlow, The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In, New York Magazine, 1970, available at http://www.spatialagency.net/database/buckminster.fuller

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. Oscar Wilde

The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesnt need to be reformed -- it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions. Ken Robinson (2010) The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. London: Penguin

Adrian Shaughnessy and Darryl Clifton in conversation What is the role and place of education in a society that values the narratives of training and explicit skill over more implicit personal development and transformation?

AS: Depends what sort of education you are talking about. If someone wants to become a doctor, they must study medicine and related sciences - with a view to becoming an expert. Same with engineers, dentists and computer scientists. The problem arises when we talk about a general education. In my view, the role of education is to teach people how to learn. The reason for this is that few of us will end up doing the same job for our entire lives, and many of us will be required to retrain at some point in the future. With this in mind, I can see a move to a sort of perpetual university model. In the future we may still go to university, but for shorter periods with a view to continuing our education at later stages. DC: Its reasonable to suggest that learning is a form of personal, intellectual and behavioural transformation and that the processes of education deliver situations, experiences and stimuli that are enabling. I would wholeheartedly agree with Adrian that developing the capacity to continue learning, adapting and transforming in short to cultivate intelligence is something that all educators should aim for through those processes. The practical implications of not being able to do that are challenging for the reasons stated above. I would also add that, in my view, education is a qualitative humanistic experience generating possibility in the mind of the individual. All of this means that it is very difficult to standardize the experience. Educators talk about differentiation, which is an attempt to try to acknowledge and support the different ways of learning that people have. This supports a highly individualized approach to teaching and learning. Training and learning explicit skills [related to technologies, craft, process etc] allow us to see what has been learnt and what a person can do, it is quantifiable. Quantifiable things are very appealing to policy makers because you can say very clearly that such and such a person can now do a thing and we can measure what they have achieved. But we need to be aware not to discount more profound experiences that relate to personal development, things which are deeply embedded in the individual that allow for continued, intelligent transformation. It is also worth bearing in mind that this can take time, its a process of maturation most students in the UK begin their HE studies between the ages of 19 21, physically mature but intellectually relatively young and inexperienced ideas, behaviour, self awareness, perceptions etc all change dramatically during that three year period. This may seem wishy washy, but anyone who has been involved in this process alongside students will know that the amount of time given is probably necessary cramming in curricula to shorter periods of time is mechanically possible but the depth of learning and personal transformation will be affected a mass production model cannot be applied to this very human, differentiated experience without the net result being radically altered and potentially diminished. Adrians perpetual university could manifest itself in different ways then as a physical space that people go to and also within the individual, utilizing the skills acquired through a more substantial experience.

AS: Graphic Design and Illustration students get the best of both worlds. These subjects can be approached as an explicit demonstrable skill that can be measured and evaluated. For example, if I design the graphics for hair care packaging and the product sells poorly, then my design has failed by commercial standards. Many designers and illustrators the majority perhaps are happy with this explicit market driven model of professional practice, and at various times (mainly in the 1980s and early 90s) design schools attempted to produces students fit only for a role in the commercial world. But design and illustration can also be approached as implicit personal skills. Today, a design education tends to resemble an education in the humanities. It seeks to give students a wider view of the world than the old one with its solely professional world focus. Design students today are developing a range of skills and insights that will equip them to enter other professions and work environments that were previously closed to them. Of course, this will take time: a design degree carries no weight outside the design world. But that will change as the students who emerge from a new design education go on to perform in non-traditional areas. It may well be that the sort of agile minds produced by good art and design schools are better equipped to deal with the new fluid, everchanging world of work, than those who come from more rigid explicit forms of education. DC: We have to acknowledge the nature of this educational experience, which has, at its core, a belief in the productive relationship between practical application theoretical study and the synthesis of the two in to a holistic practice. All Art and Design education is founded on a sense of vocational application; that the experiences you have and the practical skills that you cultivate will directly inform and constitute your professional practice. It is worth acknowledging the conflict between this mono-dimensional approach to Art and Design education, that it produces skilled individuals who operate within a narrow bandwidth of professions, and the reality that we face in the current job market to my mind this constitutes an opportunity a design challenge. So the cultivation of agile minds has to be a priority, this can only ever be achieved through a combination of the practical, theoretical and contextual experiences that good Art and Design educational experiences offer. Adrian has described the approach within Art and design education now as something that resembles an education in the humanities, this is something to be welcomed, we need to capitalize on the capacity that creative institutions have to innovate and see the kind of thinking that is encouraged in creative institutions applied across a whole range of new territories. New models for education have to be proposed and tested, relationships with external partners, i.e. potential employers, made meaningful and reciprocal and, critically, an understanding of the currency that they hold in the social, cultural and commercial arenas made clear in the minds of young Illustration and Design professionals,

Geoffrey Bocking
In July 1968 the National Conference on Art and Design Education [sponsored by the Movement for re-thinking Art and Design Education {MORADE}] asked itself 3 key questions: 1. 2. 3. Why art & design education What is a school of art? How should art schools be organized? reorientation of art teaching throughout the educational system as a whole. Voices were not lacking to remind the Conference of the equal need for realism. A recurrent theme was the relationship of Art to Society and, therefore the role or roles actual and potential of the artist and designer today. A wide diversity of views was expressed from which it emerged that the need for solidarity in confronting a world unaware of arts value or purposes outweighed the need that might arise for distinguishing differences of function and approach between say artist and designer. It was made apparent to the Conference, by the remarks of Sir John Summerson, that even within bodies nominally constituted to represent their views there is an alarming and in the present situation possibly crucial lack of fundamental understanding. It was agreed by the Conference, therefore, that a primary function of art and design education is the extension of understanding and that a world which does not know what art is about will neither be able to use it rightly nor concede to it a proper status. In this chicken & egg situation the need for internal reform is paramount and urgent. Geoffrey Bocking.

The Conference soon found itself to be in agreement that the purpose of art & design education is to develop critical awareness, to allow potentially creative people to develop their aptitudes, to encourage questioning and to stimulate discovery, and to promote creative behaviour. It was also generally agreed that this purpose could not be served except under conditions of freedom far greater than obtain at the present freedom from external control by bodies unsympathetic to and uncomprehending of its purpose, freedom to select students without constraint by irrelevant criteria, freedom to develop courses without regard to inappropriately academic national standards, and freedom from inhibition by too rigid structures of internal control. The conference recognized the urgent need for reform by the immediate removal of some of the impediments but it also recognized that reform in the longer term would need much further study and might well involve the

QUESTIONS: