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WHEN HERBERT MET KEN: THE 100 LANGUAGES OF CREATIVITY


Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Warwick, 6-9 September 2006

Nick OwenUniversity of [email protected] should be addressed toNick Owen, 31 Colebrooke Road, Liverpool L17 7BY UKTel. ++ (0) 77422 71570

Please note: this paper is in draft format and should not be quoted or reproduced without the author’s consent.

Please note: this paper is in draft format and should not be quoted or reproduced without the

author’s consent.

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Abstract

Anne Bloomfield at the Annual Research Forum of the Western Australian Institute for Educational Research in 1996 provided a succinct overview of the place of arts practice in schools in the UK since the establishment of the Education Act of 1870. She traced the roots of that work to Johann Gotlieb Fichte (1762 - 1814) in Prussia and his advocacy of a ‘national system that would be successful in realising three fundamental ideals…. The development of the individual for the benefit of the community; the stimulation of the individual into independent activity, and the development of character and good will”. She argued that Fichte’s vision was turned into practical applications by the work of Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746 – 1827) ‘whose curriculum structure and pedagogical practices were influential and seminal to the development of child centred education’: and that these strands of thinking and practice and woven together, she argues, through the 18th and 19th century by the works of Friedrich Froebel and John Dewey.

This paper explores the distance travelled in creativity discourses since the championing of arts practice by Johan Fichte. It examines what the resemblances are between these late 18th century ideals - and the polemic that is ‘All Our Futures’ produced nearly 200 years later by the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education, chaired by Prof. Ken Robinson.

The paper proposes a thought experiment written in the spirit of Tom Stoppard's Travesties in which some major contemporary thinkers on creativity and culture are brought together in the same imagined space through the conceit of a (faulty) memory play – in this case, the thinkers being drawn from National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education, the committee responsible for the Gulbenkian report, Arts in Schools of 1981 and members of the Joint Council for Education through Art who produced ‘Education through the arts report; a consideration of humanity, technology and education in our time’ in 1957, and presided over by its president, Sir Herbert Read.

It suggests a series of hypothetical conversations from the late 1950s to the early 2000s between educationalists who have been engaged with developing arts and cultural education and creativity in our schools and aims to establish what we have learnt about the discourses of creativity particularly since the early 1980s - and what impact this may have had in our classrooms. This will include a speculative dialogue between a Prof Ken Robinson of 1981 and the Prof. Ken Robinson of 1999, chaired by a Sir Herbert Read of 1957.

The paper arises from two years research as PhD student at the University of Hull, funded by a scholarship of Creative Partnerships. Entitled “A Search For ‘Creative’ ‘Partnerships’: constructing a pedagogy for creativity from the experience of Hull schools” my research has been located initially in the Early Years settings of McMillan Nursery School in Hull and has developed through interviews with artists and educators both in and beyond Hull.


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Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to provide a development of the contemporary creativity discourse through a research process based upon a hermeneutic phenomological approach in dialogue with a hypothecated - or imagined - process of narrative generation - or story telling. It does this in two ways.

Firstly, by providing a comparison of some of the key themes of two of the critical documents which have shaped our language of creativity in recent times, The Arts in Schools: Principles, practice and provision, published by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in 1982 and All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education, published by the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education or NACCCE in 1999.

Secondly, I wanted to explore this discourse in a more lateral fashion. If this process was to think about, discuss and write about creativity, then it seemed reasonable enough to find another way to review the terrain. I’ve done this in light of Egan’s work on educational research processes and the value of narrative and storytelling and hence have developed the proposal of a thought experiment written in the spirit of Tom Stoppard's Travesties in which some contemporary thinkers on creativity and culture - ie those active within the last 150 years - are brought together through the conceit of a faulty memory play.

The purpose of this methodology is to look through gaps in the literature, to read between the lines of the official documentation and attempt to divine the human dilemmas, personalities which forged those two key documents - and in doing so, to identify the other, hidden influences which have shaped the terrain of creativity discourses. I’ve done this by interviewing many members of the two committees and by listening - or reading about - the voices who were in their heads when they deliberated about the prospects of our children’s futures. This section suggests a series of hypothetical conversations from the late 1950s to the early 2000s between educationalists who have been engaged with developing arts and cultural education and creativity in our schools and aims to establish what we have learnt about the discourses of creativity particularly since the early 1980s - and what impact this may have had in our classrooms. This particular approach would not have been possible without the support of contributors from both the Gulbenkian and NACCCE committees who gave their time, interest and support. In particular I would like to thank Professor David Aspin, Marjorie Glynne Jones, John Stevens, Professor Lewis Minkin, Lindsey Fryer, Professor Susan Greenfield, Dame Tamsyn Imison, Clive Jones, Sir Claus Moser, Professor Helen Storey and particularly Sir Ken Robinson, for his generosity and time over the last 6 months.

As well as relying on the two key source texts, there have been two other starting points which have informed the development of this paper: the proposition that state education before the 1980s was somehow bereft of direction, purpose or quality. This proposition of absence was exemplified at the launch of FutureSight at the International Schooling for Tomorrow conference in September 2004, which, in presenting a case for educational reform thus:


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“Our goal is to improve the quality of teaching and learning throughout the system. We will do this by building capacity and providing flexibility at the front line, backed by an intelligent accountability framework and by targeted intervention to deal with underperformance”

presents a context for this reform with the Michael Barber model of contemporary education:

a model of educational reform which sees the 1970s almost as an ‘Educational Year Zero’ which leads naturally, perhaps inevitably and certainly progressively to a golden age of the 2000s characterised by conditions of ‘informed professional judgement’. I found myself, through the process of writing this paper whether this was the case - or whether there were other voices who would counter this proposition of the Educational Year Zero and its inexorable progression to a context of ‘informed professional judgement’.

A second factor has been the apparent shift over the last 20 years particularly from talking about specific arts education practices towards a discourse of creativity in general and a reluctance to talk specifically about artists and art in education at all. This sense that there is an ‘A’ word which shall not speak its name in the field of creativity in schools is hinted at in recent Creative Partnerships documents in which CP claims to “offers something genuinely fresh. Firstly, it moves beyond the "art education" model of the past. It looks to the full richness of our cultural and creative resources, both public and private sector – including libraries, museums and archives, architecture and design, historic properties and the built environment, film and new media, the fashion and music industries and the creative industries in all their astonishing diversity” (Creative Partnerships, 2006). This dismissal of the ‘art education model of the past’ rings alarms bells for me, sitting as it does alongside the Year Zero proposition referred to earlier. This paper is an attempt at finding out ‘what’s afoot?’ and to unearth the histories and stories which have shaped our work.


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Literature Review

The Arts in Schools: Principles, practice and provision was published by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in 1982. The report was edited and authored by Dr. Ken Robinson – initially brought into the deliberation process as a researcher and observer and in 1999 he went onto chair the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education (NACCCE), responsible for the publication of All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education – which itself ultimately led to the development of the Creative Partnerships programme across England in 2002 - amongst many other outcomes.

In setting out their argument to reposition arts education (in 1982) and creativity and cultural education (in 1999) in the curriculum, both documents argue from the position that as we live in unprecedented times, with unprecedented challenges, it is essential that educational policy makers and practitioners look to a future which commits to the centrality of arts or creative education in the development of school cultures and curricula.

In the Gulbenkian report, these unprecedented challenges revolve around patterns of employment, the relationship between education and society and the nature of cultural change in Britain. These changes are heightened by various ‘threats’ of ‘falling school rolls, cuts in public expenditure and some of the demands of educational accountability’ (Robinson, 1982, p3) and are characterised by a language of despair: “actual provision for the arts in schools, so far from getting better, is facing serious deterioration” (ibid, p6); ‘nationally, the situation is bleak and becoming bleaker (ibid, p7).

The arts however are proposed as a device for ‘repairing’ the human being, for making whole something which has become increasingly fractured, specialised, focused and technologically modified in order to cope with the economic demands of the time. I term this concept the ‘performativity of repair’ - and if we were to raise our sights for a moment from 1982 towards 2006, we can detect other policy initiatives – healthy schools, eco-schools, emotional literacy and behaviour modification schemes - which contribute to this discourse of ‘patch up and catch up’.

The NACCCE report starts in a similar tone. “Education faces challenges that are without precedent” (Robinson, 1999, p5) which it repeats: “Education throughout the world faces unprecedented challenges: technological, social, and personal.” (ibid, p7); and then elaborates upon: “the benefits of success are enormous and the costs of inaction profound”. (ibid, p15).

One significant difference between the NACCCE and Gulbenkian reports is that whilst Arts in Schools might be construed as a plea to policy makers, All Our Futures had the policy makers closely involved in its formulation. Both the Rt. Hons David Blunkett and Chris Smith (Secretaries of State for Education and Employment and Culture, Media and Sport respectively) were involved in drawing the Committee together and both comment regularly during the report on the significance of the NACCCE venture:


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“… we cannot rely on a small elite, no matter how highly educated or highly paid. Instead we need the creativity, enterprise and scholarship of all our people” (Blunkett, D. ibid, p5)

and“We must change the concept of creativity from being something that is ‘added on’ to education, skills and training and management and make sure if become intrinsic to all of these” (Smith, C., ibid p5)

One apparent consequence of the NACCCE work was the subsequent implementation of the Creative Partnerships scheme and its intentions for education which are to “provoke debate about 'creativity' – what is a Creative School, a Creative Classroom, a Creative Teacher, a Creative Parent and of course, most importantly, a Creative Child, with similar questions for the Cultural and Creative organisations involved in the programme1”.

Aspin (1994) forewarned us of this tendency to glorify abstractions in his writings on ‘quality’; referring to how a term becomes ‘protean’ – both formed and formless, meaningful and meaningless - once it becomes part of the language armory of educational policy makers and administrators. If this was true of ‘quality’ in the early 1990’s it has also become true of ‘creativity’ in the last 10 years. Whilst Aspin participated in the writing of the Gulbenkian’s The Arts in Schools report, he did not at the time foresee the marked change of trajectory that Robinson would take between 1982 and 1999 in his strategy to re-configure arts and cultural education in schools as argued in All Our Futures.

From initially arguing for a repositioning of arts education in schools as being essential to contributing to a holistic, humanistic education, Robinson eventually found himself arguing for a programme which, in marginalising the artist in preference to the more amorphous ‘creative’, was purposefully designed to appeal to government ministers who, whilst keen to maintain the momentum of their late 90s educational policies and the sheen of New Labour radicalism, were also anxious not to be seen to be caving into a small articulate arts lobby who had an assortment of axes to grind. So the profession of the ‘creative’ was legitimised and the search for the holy grail of economic prosperity with the amulet of creativity reinvigorated. “Crisis? What Crisis?”

Robinson has continued to communicate this message of unprecedented economic change in education on many other occasions. At the Arts and Culture in Education Conference, A-Must or A-Muse in the Netherlands in 2002 he provided the key note address to the conference and expressed his view that the debates on creativity and the relationship of arts within the curriculum had a global significance” “the truth is that every educational system represented at this conference, every education system everywhere, is facing a revolution.” (Robinson, 2002).

The quasi-apocalyptic view that Robinson has expressed over the last 25 years are not new and his is not the voice of the lone prophet in the wilderness. Robinson himself is an echo of earlier voices in the English education system broadcasting much the same message of the need to redress the place of arts education within the curriculum. Sir 1


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Herbert Read, in introducing the Conference held by the Joint Council for Education through Art in 1957 said:

“The ideal of education is no longer the development of the whole man… it is an intensive search for special aptitudes and the development of a chosen aptitude into a particular technique. We are told that our survival as a nation depends on the partial and specialised form of education…” (Read, 1957)

Blackham concluded the conference with “… we want to form a body of enlightened opinion drawn from all walks of life which will bring general public opinion to share our conviction and see our vision of the role of the arts in general and the role of general education in the life of our industrial mass society” (ibid, p62).

The Gulbenkian report concludes its opening chapter with the proposal that “there is no better motto for this Inquiry. It is all the more poignant therefore that this is a struggle in which we are now, even more pressingly, engaged 20 years on” (Robinson,1982, p17): and now that we are a further 24 years on from that report, it is telling that that motto – or variations upon its theme are being heard from arts educators not just within the UK but around the world.

The Great Debate

The proposition that contemporary schools and public education systems across the world are in some state of crisis has an echo in the alleged words of James Callaghan, the British Prime Minister between 1974 and 1979. He was alleged to uttered this infamous phrase on 10 January 1979 upon his return from a four nation summit in Guadeloupe when many MPs felt he should have stayed in Britain to deal with the widespread industrial unrest which the UK was experiencing at the time.

Whilst he actually said: "I promise if you look at it from the outside, I don't think other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos" it was a journalist from The Sun Newspaper who translated this statement into the catalytic phrase, “Crisis What Crisis?” and which, in summing up the mood of the nation at the time, contributed to the Labour Party’s loss of power in 1979, the subsequent election of a Conservative government, the appointment of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister and the eventual creation of the Education Reform Act (ERA) in 1988.

Ironically enough, it was Callaghan himself who could be said to have started the ERA process in 1976 when he delivered a speech at Ruskin College, Oxford which was the first major policy speech on education by any Prime Minister in the UK – itself prompted by the perceived public and political unrest and crisis in education which was felt at that time:

“The Labour movement has always cherished education: free education, comprehensive education, adult education. Education for life. There is nothing wrong with non- educationalists, even a prime minister, talking about it again…. I take it that no one claims exclusive rights in this field. Public interest is strong and legitimate and will be satisfied. We spend £6bn a year on education, so there will be discussion. But let it be rational. If everything is reduced to such phrases as 'educational freedom' versus state control, we shall get nowhere. I repeat that


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parents, teachers, learned and professional bodies, representatives of higher education and both sides of industry, together with the government, all have an important part to play in formulating and expressing the purpose of education and the standards that we need. “ (Callaghan, 1976)

Whilst it is interesting to see a variation on a theme of Tony Blair’s mission of ‘Education, Education, Education’ of the late 90s in Callaghan’s speech, the speech as a whole had a galvanising effect on the British Education system and was the starting point for what became known as “The Great Debate’: particularly because of his call to involve both community and industry in the debate about the future of the British Education system.

There is no disguising the fear that is driving this debate; the fear of non-achievement on the world economic stage, the fear of children being excluded from their place in a democratic society; the fear of the dominance of a schooling regime which privileges the acquisition of narrow, instrumental skills over the nurturing of all the whole human; and the equivalent, reversed fear of a of letting it all hang out, of making a primrose path back to the 1970s and a dominance of a flaky, ‘child centred learning’ pedagogy which denies the need for young people to acquire skills and knowledge which will see them survive and thrive in a post-school cut and thrust world of economic competition.

That debate - coupled with the rise of the rise of what Tolofari called New Public Management (NPM) (Tolofari, S, 2005) - has been characterised by marketisation, privatisation, managerialism, performance measurement and accountability. Essentially public services – including education - are being moved away from a culture of service to a culture of scrutiny.

This culture of scrutiny is characterised by a range of practices brought together under the banner of performativity which on the one level seems a relatively easy concept to grasp with its combination of ‘performance’’ and ‘productivity’, terms which seem straightforward enough to understand and have an aspirational quality to them. Which of us don’t want to perform to the best of our ability? Who would want to be unproductive? However, it stems from the work of Jean Francois Lyotard who describes Performativity as a technology, a culture and a mode of regulation, or a system of 'terror' that employs judgments, comparisons and displays as means of control, attrition and change.

He suggests that the performances of individuals or organisations serve as measures of productivity or output, or displays of 'quality', or moments of promotion or inspection. They represent the worth, quality or value of an individual or organisation within a field of judgment. ‘An equation between wealth, efficiency, and truth is thus established' (Lyotard, 1984). Instead of being this aspirational concept then, performativity is actually marked by a series of much more hard headed managerial practices – the instruments of this technology.

The mid 80s saw an early manifestation of performativity in the arts with the release by the Arts Council of Great Britain of its first ever general strategy document, The Glory of the Garden, which, according to Baz Kershaw:

“proposed a major redistribution of its funds in order to redress an acknowledged imbalance of support between London and the regions and, yet more crucially from


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an economic point of view, to increase funding "partnerships" between its "clients" and both private sponsors and local authorities. The redistribution was to be paid for by total cuts in grant to some 40 organizations, including a number of leading left-wing theatre companies and, ironically, several regional repertory companies, while the drive for partnership funding was to be stimulated by Council schemes to increase management efficiency and business acumen in the arts sector as a whole…. its underlying purpose became the main element of state funding policy for the next fourteen years: economic "realities"--particularly as figured by the "spending power" of the consumer--were to drive the engine of theatrical and other cultural change. Thatcherism sanctioned a more interventionist role for the Arts Council in order to open up the subsidy system-- and all the subsidized theatres--to "free" market forces.”

Re- imagining the Artist Teacher and Teacher Artist

The glory of this garden-path led to the work of John Myerscough in 1988. In The Economic Importance of the Arts in Great Britain Myerscough prepared the ground for the possibility of the identity transition from ‘artist’ to ‘creative’. His work led many arts organisations and the public arts funding sector as a whole to steering – sometimes reluctantly and sometimes not - a path away from valuing and proclaiming the artistic or aesthetic merits of their craft and processes to valorising and promoting the economic benefit of their practices and products. This transition from artist to creative is perhaps an inevitable coda to this structural realignment of the industry of arts to arts business and is also foreshadowed by Tonnies (1887) in his analysis of ‘natural will’ (Wesenwille) and ‘rationale will’ (Kurwille).

Tonnies argues that these two forms of complementary, oppositional and inter-related human will shape human relations and bring about two forms of human social organisation – Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. He proposes (ibid, p116) that ‘Kurwille’ can be broken into three forms – forethought (deliberation), arbitrary choice (free will, choosing what ever you please) and conceptual thought – which are echoed 100 years later in contemporary definitions of creativity. So if the expression of Kurwille leads to a human social bond marked by characteristics of Gesellschaft then might there be an alternative definition of creativity which alludes to Wesenwille and with it the (re)generation of social bonds as exemplified in Tonnies’ Gemeinschaft?

In a kind of parallel narrative universe, the reconstruction of artist identities is being mirrored by an equivalent process of reconstruction of teachers identities – another example of educational infrastructure redevelopment which is developing new ‘actors’ for a new age of education. The ‘priesthood of the teachers’ is being reconfigured to an ‘actorhood’ of teachers, in which teacher based pedagogies are being reconfigured to conceive and present the teacher as architect, planner, facilitator or (in one recent example in a Hull Primary School) as commissioning editors.

Perhaps ironically, the artist / creative practitioner is implicit in this process and is the catalyst for this transition. Relationships in school settings are also subsequently subject to pressure to change from relationships which are characterised by gemeinschaft to a style characterised by gesellschaft. The culture of managerialism, targets and outputs –of performativity - are the tools for this shift.


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So - how might artists working in education inoculate themselves against this virus of performativity, whose DNA strands are composed of the language codes of target setting, outputs, managerial control, unitary learning, monologic learning and risk avoidance - and whose result is in the emotional response of fear which, like a rash or a prophylactic shock has been spreading through the body of education since the early 1950s?

One starting point might at the very least be the remembrance of our histories, the valorisation of narrative and the resistance to the primacy of the number, to counting and to its very specific type of accountability- the acknowledgement that we have been here before. Subjective memory might prove a worthwhile adversary of performativity or at least provide a site for resistance.


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Methodology: Telling the stories

Hence, the second part of my paper: a thought experiment written in the spirit of Tom Stoppard's Travesties in which some contemporary thinkers on creativity and culture - ie those active within the last 150 years - are brought together in an imagined - yet very real - space of the Bonnington Hotel in Belgravia, London through the conceit of a faulty memory play.

Here’s what the website HotelsRUs (presumably the leisure industries equivalent of ToysRUs - the dominant commercial voice of play development and children’s expressivity) says of the Bonnington Hotel:

"The Bonnington Hotel in Bloomsbury was opened in 1911 by Lord Strathcona and is located in the heart of London's attractions. For today’s business and leisure traveler, we offer 247 en suite rooms including 32 recently opened executive rooms and suites. Our extensive facilities include 14 newly refurbished conference rooms, 4 Elevators, 1 restaurant , 1 bar area as well as internet cafe and fitness room spread over 8 floors.

This provides a ratio of executive rooms to ensuite rooms of 0.130 - an indication of its exclusivity perhaps. Traveler Ramon Lambert said in his on line review:

“The service at the hotel was very kind, the room was perfect and the breakfast very good. I would rate Bonnington with 4.5 points out of five.”

One wonders what it was about the standards of the hotel which prevented Mr. Ramon Lambert from providing a further 0.5 points which would have indicated that the hotel was perfect? Increasing the executive room to ensuite ratio to anything over 0.15 perhaps? Or a closer alignment of elevators to floors (currently evaluated at 4 to 8)?

What is perhaps more disappointing - and which would have induced this customer to score the hotel more highly had I stayed there, was that there is nowhere in the on-line review of the Bonnington Hotel - either by customers old or new - is its recognition as a place for catalysing significant developments in the development of arts education and creativity and cultural education in UK.

Welcome to the Hotel Bonnington Belgravia

Up in the loft, competing teams of hotel architects argue vociferously about the design of the hotel: form, function, aesthetics, values, money - the air is blue with competing prints for the refurbishment of the hotel: the architects Descartes Spinoza wave a modernist plan based upon the perfectabllism of the human enterprise at the hotel managers and show how progress can be engineered to a desirable end. The firm Wordsworth Schiller on the other hand conjure up a romantic blueprint and attempt to take a match to the work of Descartes team, setting the loft alight for a few brief minutes until the installed fire extinguishers are set off and reduce the architectural drawings to soaking, smouldering, burnt fragments of plans and visions.


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In the kitchen, one old chef, Vail Motter is cooking up recipes for The School Drama in England leafing through Calder Cook’s 1915 cook book, The Play Way, possibly one of the first English text books on the roots of drama in education. In the dining room, John Hodgson, writer of seminal text book Improvisation, plays with his breakfast, pretending it’s a train set.

Upstairs, Ken Robinson a young PhD student, dishevelled and with a wild staring look in his eyes - a stare, troubled by his visions of the future and the lack of sleep he’s getting on account of his adventures down in Chelsea at the Royal Court Youth Theatre - is in a small bedroom and sits, hunched on the side of his bed banging hard on his portable typewriter which is perched on his lap.

Dear Diary. The inhabitants of Room 1959 just can’t keep it down. All this fuss between drama and theatre in schools. Self expression or vocational training, Individual development or cultural identity, they just can’t make their minds up.

Cut to:

One of the as yet unreburbished conference rooms, Room 1959, is hosting an aggrieved collection of drama teachers, theatre specialists, fledgling theatre in education activists, writers and politicians. Peter Slade writer of Child Drama, at the forefront of the schism between drama and theatre steps out into the corridor to get some fresh air, away from the intense arguments which stem from around the water jugs. Echoing down the corridors he hears:

“drama is about promoting children’s self expression, about enhancing their ability for self discovery, not training for mere jobs in the theatre!

But when you say its about developing an individual, what kind of individual do you mean? An empathetic, aware one presumably who’s well behaved?

Theatre’s not just about the individual - its also about developing a sense of cultural identity, not just an individual in abstract - this romance of the individual - pah!”

Over in the infirmary, John Allen, HMI for drama - soon to be a member of the Gulbenkian committee which produced Artist in Schools over 20 years later - administers elastoplasts and bandages to the walking wounded in an attempt to heal the wounds which have surfaced from the deep ideological split which is being witnessed downstairs in the unrefurbished conference room.

Dissolve back to Ken:

They’re not even sure how much is going on, where it’s going on, whose doing it, why and how. Whether its been going on since the Greeks or the next best thing since Sputnik. They’ll be fighting it out in the corridors next of they’re not careful. This alleged difference in schools between drama and theatre is misconceived - it’s selling kids and their teachers short. I know its part of this continuing syndrome of separating feeling from thinking but It gets on my nerves.


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He opens the drawer of his bedside cabinet and next to Gideon’s Bible he finds a dusty copy of Half Our Future - A report for the central advisory council for Education by John Newsom which he picks up and leafs through. The cabinet nearly topples over at this point so he hurriedly replaces the book, making a mental note of its title in the process.

There’s a knock on his door. It’s a party up from the University down the road - Lynne McGregor and Maggie Tate from Room 1977 ready for a good night out, complete with whistles, blowers, party hats and kazoos. They open a bottle of gin, leave a bundle of paperwork on Ken’s bed - the draft of Learning Through Drama for the Schools Council Drama Teaching Projects - and asks if wants to accompany them to see the latest Arnold Schwarzenegger film, Pumping Iron. They have a bit of a thing about body builders it seems.

Ken stares at the paperwork and reluctantly lets Lynne and Maggie go their own way. He has a lot of writing to catch up on.

Dear Diary. Its about time someone did a survey. Better be me I suppose.

A Call to Arms: Room 1982, Bonnington Hotel

Peter Brinson - ex-tank commander. Fought against Rommel as desert rat. Author of Ballet for All. Royal Ballet. Joined by Ken Robinson in Cardiff at National Milk Bar on a dry Wales Sunday. Inveigle Peter Newsom, EO of the ILEA to prepare a report about arts in schools as pre-emptive strike on the political agenda. Gulbenkian fund it. Don’t write it art form by art from - locks it into a structure that is already known, people will read their own chapters - which they’ll then find wanting. We’re on a barrel roll - going in 2 directions simultaneously. Wonderful stuff. Don’t need to talk about definitions - or what arts is. Can discuss it without defining it. We can talk about this without truthfully saying what we’re talking about. That’ll keep the buggers on their toes.

A charabanc from the Gulbenkian Foundation draws up outside the hotel. Peter Brinson, group leader from the Gulbenkian coach lets his enthusiastic bunch off the coach, some of whom wander from the main group once in a while - their talk is rich with the excitement of children, young people, the arts, schools, education. He ticks them off his list with a flourish as they leave the coach and enter the hotel.


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Guest list for Room 1982, Bonnington Hotel

Peter Brinson, Director, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (UK) (chair)John Allen, Professor of Drama, University of LondonDavid Aspin, Professor of Education, Kings College, University of LondonEva Barnes, District Inspector, City of Manchester Education DepartmentNorman Binch, Staff Inspector for Art and Design, ILEABob Clement, Advisor for Art, Devon County CouncilDavid Dougan, Director, Northern ArtsAndrew Fairbairn, Director of Education, Leicestershire County CouncilMaurice Gilmour, Advisor for dance and Movement, Leicestershire County CouncilMarjorie Glynne Jones, Principal Lecturer in Music Education, Middlesex PolytechnicRobert Hedley Lewis, Principal, London College of PrintingGeoffrey Hodson, Senior Inspector of Drama, ILEAAlan Hutchinson, Principal, Paddington CollegeTrevor Jagger, Senior Inspector for Secondary Education, ILEARalph Jeffery, Senior Inspector: Art and Design Department of Education and ScienceGeoffry Melling, HMI, Department of Education and ScienceJoan Mclaren, Senior Inspector for PE, ILEABetty Osgathorp, County Inspector for PE, Kent County CouncilJocelyn Owen, Chief Education Officer, Devon County CouncilMaurice Plaskow, Curriculum Officer, Schools CouncilKenneth Robinson, Writer and Lecturer in arts educationClifford Romany, Headmaster, Kingsthorpe Upper School, NorthamptonJohn Stephens, Staff Inspector for Music, ILEAD Llion Williams, Director, North Wales Arts Association

Whilst the group radiates warmth and mutual affection, outside the coach the air is chilly. John Stephens peers nervously out of the bus, looking up at the sky for signs of inclement weather. Colleagues, leaving the bus with guitars in hand, ballet shoes on feet, hearts on sleeves, cajole him to leave the bus, confident their work will combat the perceived threat of bad weather. Signage at the Bonnington is confusing: for child centred education - turn left. For skills, knowledge and achievement - turn right. For the path of patch up and catch up: you’re on the wrong bus. Return immediately to base.

Outside, perched on a fire hydrant, Clifford Romany spins fantastic anecdotes, of music, of drama, of expressivity, of creativity of Kingsthorpe School in Northamptonshire, Ancient Mariner-like to any teachers who happen to be passing by. One startled Head teacher ripostes: ‘but we don’t do music in our school! Exams? National curriculum? You’re calling into question my personal and professional judgement. Whatever next!” and walks off down the road away from the Bonnington towards the wilderness of Shaftsbury Avenue and the West End of London.

In the foyer, Marjorie Glynne Evans and John Stephens have struck up an informal musical ensemble with their pal, John Paynter, away on a long weekend from York. Together they compose music for cutlery, hotel furniture and wine glasses and perform to an appreciative, gathering audience who are wowed by their ingenuity, technical skill and compositional awareness.


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Once the coach has unpacked, the tour guides steer the Gulbenkian party to Room 82 - a partially refurbished conference room. The group scribes - Peter Brinson, David Aspin and John Allen collect suggestions and ideas from the coach party and passing hotel guests who pop their head around the door to see what all the noise is about.

The energy is good humoured but not uncritical - waves of opinion wash around Room 82 about the style of their book / manuscript - should it be for future academics? For current politicians? For the guests in the hotel lobby who could do with some guidance on how to find their way around this hotel? They agree to allocate tasks as necessary and also on the need for one clear authorial voice and hand the portable type writer over to Ken Robinson who’s wandered in from the corridor while looking for the trouble makers of Room 1959 who still can’t keep the noise down.

Ken proceeds to share paperwork with fellow travellers, looks over their contributions, mutters to himself - ‘take out the howevers and therefores, take out the howevers and therefores’ before dispatching it back to David Aspin, requesting further slashing or academic rewriting, however he wants to look at it.

There’s suddenly a flurry of activity downstairs in the hotel lobby. Lord Gowrie, Minister for the Arts has inadvertently wandered off the streets, claiming to be looking for somewhere to live - his £30,000 per year salary is proving impossible to live on in London- and he needs somewhere to put his head down. He’s directed upto Room 82 and spends an agreeable time with the Gulbenkian party - and in return for letting him hang around them for a few years, he agrees to take their work to the House of Lords so that his mates can mutter a few important words about the state of schools these days, how standards are slipping, how people are increasingly illiterate and that something has to be done about it forgodssake.

The party set about their task with renewed enthusiasm and bunker themselves into room 82, not leaving it until their task is complete. An exhausted Ken Robinson emerges into the daylight on 15 April and takes a taxi to the House of Lords to hand over the manuscript to Gowrie to share with his mates. Driving up to parliament is more difficult than usual though - the paparazzi are out in force, all of Gowrie’s mates are queuing to get into the House of Lords - a couple of black limousines with tinted windows jump the queue of their lordships and Ken gets a glimpse of Margaret Thatcher applying her lipstick and rouge in the backseat of a limo. Over on the Thames, a battleship is loading up with young, fresh faced recruits, many of whom have just left school, dispirited, disengaged but who’ve flocked to London from the cotton towns of Lancashire, the mining villages of Yorkshire and the car showrooms of the West Midlands in order to get a bit of action, to get a bit of meaning back in their life ‘down south’ - by which they don’t mean the wine bars of Clapham Common but the swell and gun smoke smell of the South Atlantic.

Within the next 20 minutes - because that’s all it takes - the House of Lords hear about how the Task Force has been sent down to the Falklands Malvinas to regain our sovereign territory - an adventure which will eventually result in 255 British and 649 Argentinean deaths. The House is packed to its gunnels - and after hearing about how war has been declared on the South Atlantic, they settle back to hear the reflections of the Gulbenkian party in its report, The Arts in Schools - Principles, practice and provision.


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Ken wends his way back to Room 1982 and relates the story. The coach party agree that the presentation of the report to a full House is a seminal moment in the history of arts education - but can’t agree whether its seminal because it will be sidelined and forgotten in the light of the war; or seminal because it will be remembered and acted upon in light of the war. One way or another they can agree that the Thatcher government had a significant role in the development of arts education in England - although are unclear as to whether this is by accident or design.

John Stephens speaks to some waiting, tetchy reporters outside the Hotel:

Thanks for attending this press call today. We’re from a mixed background, arts specialists from all arts disciplines and educationalists who’ve given up our time for this work. We believe there’s a social imperative underlying the work of arts educationalists - and consequently a clear political agenda. Lets say from the start that there’s an artist inside everyone. Full stop, non-negotiable…

Yes, we know there’s need for basic skills in our schools - we’re not talking about a carefree, laissez faire attitude to children’s development here you know - listening skills are important to everyone not just musicians you know… did you hear that at the back?

We see our work as making a significant contribution to the recent political and arts debates…. no, music isn’t just about learning how to read the dots, acquiring technical skills or reciting the history of extinct British composers. Music education has to include composition…

What do you mean you can’t teach composition? It’s a skill like everything else and like everything else it can be learnt. Look, if you don’t believe me, go ask John Paynter - he’s playing around with Peter Maxwell Davis over there in the foyer.

Yes, we know there are some appalling examples of bad practice and that just occasionally the perception of a child’s composition skills will be erroneously inflated as the result of a teachers arrangement skills but we fully anticipate before too long that CSE exam boards will include composition and improvisation as part of their examination syllabus - and so confirming its real and proper status within the work of the school. Central to our work of arts education is our belief about the importance of creativity - mind you, we’re not claiming that its just the arts are about creativity…

Yes, I know the groups predominantly composed of performing and visual artists but we have teachers too…. And no, we don’t have any engineers or scientists on the group…. No, or footballers or cooks either …

Look, the point of all this is about the arts in our schools OK? And we’re at the beginning of this potentially huge development in creativity in our schools so just give us a bit of time and space and we’ll show you what we mean. Creativity? What do we mean by creativity? Well, that’s obvious isn’t it? Rejoice! Next!


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Back in the Bonnington Hotel in Room 1985, Ken Robinson chairs the launch of a project as a consequence of the AiS report - the Schools Curriculum Development committee - the SCDC - Arts in Schools project which aims to give practical support to schools and local education authorities in developing the place of the arts in education of all pupils. He’s listening to the echoes of Peter Slade elsewhere in the hotel, “back in the same room trying to knit it back together again”.

The proposal is accepted by the SCDC, who then appoint him to work as its director with 18 LEAS who proceed to engage over 2000 people in 300 projects in 25 regions, involving all the relevant RAAs and the Arts council over the next 4 years. No direct funding is offered to schools or LEAs - the project team work with local coordinators, have a core budget of £300,000 to pay for a core team - and go on to generate four to five times as much as this on activity when the cost of local secondments are taken into account.

The work acts to provide support for local action through a national platform: each school has its own project , and the role of coordinators is to identify good practice, witness it and then tell everybody else about it. The project results in three documents: The Arts 5 - 16, A Curriculum framework, The Arts 5 -16 practice and Innovation and A workpack for teachers and rejoices in the work carried out in its name.

Rejoice was the rallying cry for years to come after the events of 15 April, 1982 - but whether this was to rejoice in the conquest of the Falklands Malvinas, the future formulation of a National Curriculum and the optional status the arts had in it or the rise and rise of OfSTED and its self confessed “too naïve, too idealistic, too gullible” English teacher’ Chief Inspector - depended on what side of the megaphone you were standing on.

Fast Forward…

Rolling up to the Bonnington, the NACCCE coach now arrives, a more fantastical invention that the Gulbenkian coach which preceded it - one of the larger football team style coaches with huge wing mirrors like Bassett hound ears, it pulls smoothly up to the doors of the hotel , noiselessly opens its front passenger door and a dazzling collection of people, spill out into the street, some wearing shades, suits, expensive jewellery, the finery of their positions betraying the fact that they are the education cognoscenti, from all walks of life - media, arts, education, business. Autograph hunters gather on the pavements on the look out for their favourite celebrity.

The guest list is impressive:


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Professor Ken Robinson (Chairman), University of WarwickProfessor Lewis Minchin (Vice-chair), Sheffield Hallam UniversityProfessor Eric Bolton CB Senior Chief Inspector HMIDawn French, Actor/ComedianLindsey Fryer, Vice-chair, Engage The National Association of Gallery EducationProfessor Susan Greenfield, University of OxfordValerie Hannon, Chief Education Officer, DerbyshireLenny Henry CBE, Actor / ComedianDawn Holgate, Director of Education, Phoenix Dance CompanyDame Tamsyn Imison, Head, Hampstead School, LondonClive Jones, Chief Executive, Carlton TelevisionJudith Kelly OBE, Artistic Director, West Yorkshire PlayhouseProfessor Sir Harold Kroto Kt., FRS, University of SussexSir Claus Moser KCB, CBE, FBA, Chairman, Basic Skills AgencySir Simon Rattle Kt., CBE, ConductorLord Stone of Blackheath, Managing Director, Marks & Spencer plcProfessor Helen Storey, Fashion DesignerCarol Traynor, Head, St Boniface RC Primary School, Salford

The group walk swiftly into the lobby of the hotel, check in effortlessly and swarm off to the rooms, the bar, the restaurant, pursued by the more determined autograph hunters. The last member of the group, walks in alone, dumps his bulging suitcase, manuscripts packed in tightly. He signs his name, avoids the lift and sets off up the stairs to his room on the 9th floor. Lewis Minkin has arrived. Helen Storey meets him on the way down, he shares some thoughts about death with her in the stair well and continues his lone journey up the hotel’s stairs.

Lewis enters the refurbished conference room to find it has been decorated in the style of a court room. He joins the other 18 members of the NACCCE committee and the Gulbenkian group in the public gallery and is joined by other longer standing residents of the hotel - Johann Pesatlozzi stares hard around the court room, taking in all around him; Friederich Froebel comes bearing gifts for the jury but has to leave them outside in the corridor, Maria Montessori follows, uttering ‘education of the senses then education of the intellect’ under her breath, an irascible Johan Fichte enters the gallery, swearing and cursing Terets-style, he tries to make his way to the centre of the court but is firmly held back by Bertrand Russell who banishes him to the back benches of the hotel court room. In the dock is seated Professor Ken Robinson, surrounded by volumes of his and others’ life work. To his left sits the judge, Sir Herbert Read; to his right sits the jury: hotel gardeners, porters, cooks and various ancillary staff, all listening to the prosecuting barrister who is in full flow:

Members of the jury, I put it to you that the work of the NACCCE committee was misconceived, subsequently ignored and were the results of a valiant and well intentioned individual who subsequently spun a career for himself as the Robinson Road Show, intent on travelling the globe to extol the features of his own thoughts and opinions about creativity. Your worship, I suggest that committee members felt marginalised, that what they said didn’t fit into what civil


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servants wanted; that they were the unwitting recipients of a governmental process, arising from a political view which knew that if it wanted to bury something - in this case, the call for enhanced creative and cultural education in our schools - that they simply need set up a committee and ask them to write a report about it. It was a recipe for inaction.

The defence lawyer leaps to her feet.

Objection your honour. The calibre of the committee would have seen through that tactic within the first few minutes of walking through the hotel doors. Whilst we know that the announcement of the process came out of the blue somewhat, it was welcomed: it was clear that the two Secretary of States wanted to be responsive to claims that the curriculum was being narrowed and that teachers were turning into technicians. The Rt Hon. Blunkett was particularly frustrated at the long shadow of the national curriculum - and this work was an attempt to offset this pressure.

The prosecutor blinks.

A Canute like attempt I would suggest my Lord. With the time scale being so short, and everybody being so busy the fact is that some things became very difficult and only a few of them helped with the writing of the report. This wasn’t a committee: it was more like a collection of dazzling people, with only five and six of them at any one time contributing and with many of whom hardly turning up at all.

The defence is irritated.

Objection your honour - this is irrelevant - in the final analysis everyone totally approved of everything that went in.

The prosecutor looks over his spectacles down his nose at the defence.

Everyone? Including Professor Lewis Minkin?

The defence looks momentarily uncomfortable.

That was a very Interesting relationship and not something to be made an issue of. Professor Robinson had to sift through so much evidence. The final report needed a clear voice. They couldn’t have all written it, it would have been nonsensical. Besides, they all saw drafts of the report and knew that a major source was Lewis Minkin who provided an original definition of creativity and much of the theoretical work on creativity and its links with culture - the intellectual muscle if you like. The fact is, it was a multifaceted group, and made a big effort to go beyond the standard classroom curriculum and to think outside the box; it was composed of very interesting people who looked beyond the 3 Rs. But it was known all along that it was one thing to be multicreative – it was another to know what to do about it and how to reach out. This was the ghost in the machine if you like.


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The prosecutor returns to his papers.

My learned colleague is correct in that the major issue is not who wrote it but how the language of creativity was contested and understood by the committees members. This contest was apparent when some members brought in un-thought through assumptions that it was all about the arts or a return to the values of pre1980s education - which it wasn’t. The political context was very different: it was in which the creative industries had become a major contributing factor to the country’s economic health: the arts were merely part of a wider discourse on creativity.

The group as a whole had difficulty in connecting to the debates about standards or to demonstrate a respect for the National Literacy Strategy (warts and all) or show a willingness to build upon it. This reflected an ‘elephant in the room’ if you like - the beast of poor standards and an unwillingness to acknowledge that many children had received a raw deal from schools before the 80s.

Sir Herbert Read raises an eyebrow.

Ghost in the machine? Elephant in the room? Smacks of airy fairy, emotional, strategy dreaming on a whim and a prayer - not an objective, rational way of determining policy. Hardly a way in which to proceed is it?

He winks at the defence barrister. The prosecutor takes a deep breath.

Quite so my Lord. My point here is that the need to see creativity as part of wider practice than arts practice, coupling as it did the scientific and artistic claims on the concept, contributed to a tendency to replace the word ‘art’ with ‘creativity’ in the debates: which itself led to the diffuseness of the report. Whilst it is true that there were eminently respected scientists present - some members of the Royal Institute to boot - there was still a strong arts bias in the team which meant that there wasn’t a specific language of understanding creativity. There was no way in which Rattle and Kroto and all the others spoke the same language. There was only one common word - creativity - and one word does not a language make.

The defence adopts a tone of superiority.

On the contrary your worship, this alleged lack of commonality in the language of creativity is something that has been known about for the last 150 years - may I respectfully remind your worship of his own legacy, what with the work of his friend and colleague Lord Snow and his seminal work The Two Cultures.

The prosecutor interrupts.

Everyone knows that creativity is equally related to science and arts practice and that creativity and culture were 2 sides of the same coin. The danger is that without being more specific about what was meant the committee was eventually going to have to deal with the whole of life when what it needed to was ask questions about the education world - to schools, to curriculum, to teaching methods - these had to be its central tasks. Its lack of specificity meant that it


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tried to be all things to all people and was in danger of losing focus. It consequently resulted in hundreds of non-prioritised recommendations - something which is not particularly helpful to government or to curriculum formulation. No recommendation is more important than anything else; everything relates to everything else; but what are the actions for ministers? Where are the three things that are more important than the other 160?

This conflict arose very early on and was framed around whether a specific set of recommendations in short 20 / 30 page report for two ministers with respect to teaching methods should have been produced - perhaps with a more substantial report which would be followed up later or whether the full 100+ page report should have been published - knowing full well that this was difficult stuff which might have been welcome in the academic world but begged the question of what would Smith and Blunkett have done with it? It was, as I’ve said before, a recipe to ask for inaction. I compare with the Robbins Report of the 1960s on the need for expansion of student numbers. This report turned into a white paper in 24 hours; in NACCCE, nothing is very urgent. ‘Do this’ implies you have to ‘do all that’ - which is fine for an academic thesis where you need to show intellectual brilliance - but as a government report - it died on its feet the day it was released: and I am not conscious of any direct action that subsequently arose from the report - although it may very well have had a long term affect on thinking about the topic, useful to the universities at least.

In summing up, I put it to you that the legacy of All Our Futures was nothing more than a means for people to consider, reflect upon and discuss creativity in education - and has had no impact on schools, on children, on teachers, on the very heart of our educational project. A superior form of PhD perhaps; but a misguided, irrelevant and consequently sadly ignored government document.

At this point, the members of the public gallery express their dismay loudly, leave their benches and proceed to redecorate the refurbished conference room, some attempting to knock down the walls of the recently refurbished conference room.

One draws on the walls fungus-like filament threads out of a glorious garden landscape, others post notes and pictures of significant moments and phenomena - the small garden city of Creative Partnerships; new curriculum drives with titles such as Energy: Auditing natural energy flow of teenage girls and their teacher to create a perfect working week; Eye and I - space to explore authentic human emotion; Wonderland: When chemistry, design and culture collide; Creative lab; Ideas that can change the world. Another staples the QCA scheme of work – Creativity: find it promote it to the wall; another sellotapes the Creativity and Learning programme of the National College of School Leadership next to it.

One paints a cartoon of a minister with an enormous nose to indicate their an enhanced sensitivity to creative learning. Someone graffiti’s the word ‘literacy’ on a wall and some-one else scrawls ‘creative’ over the top of it. Some-one else scribbles above it: what do we want? And ‘and we want it now’ under it. Someone draws a story board entitled ‘the priesthood of the teachers’ in which a group of adults who drag their knuckles along the floor (labelled AOTS - adults other than teachers) are welcomed into a cartoon school by teachers whose favourite armchairs are burning in a school playground. A superhero


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flies through the scene with Personalised Learning: agenda of the future emblazoned upon his chest. One sings of the work of London Sinfonietta in Tower Hamlets, another opens the doors to La Voce Della Luna, a grassroots Community choir of 30 women ranging from the ages of 30 years to 80 years old of 1st to 5th generation Italian / Australian women, singing songs from all regions of Italy, handed down from fathers, mothers and grandmothers and collective memory. They sing songs of work, protest, love, weddings, seductions, lullaby and death.

At this point Ken Robinson leaps from the dock, unbound, throws open the conference doors and ushers in Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California, muscles gleaming in the weak summer sunshine, waving two large cheques above his head, both written out to ‘the children of California: their Arts Education entitlement. One, stamped with CAPITAL INVESTMENT across it is for $500m; the other, stamped with REVENUE across it, is for $100m per annum. But that which gathers most interest - from judge, jury and barristers alike - is the graphic representation of the destroyed school building; moribund due to lack of use, lack of interest - and lack of people. A title is printed neatly underneath: what’s left in the ground when our memory fails us.

Conclusions

Visions of the Future: how Sir Herbert Read might have summed up

“Over the city of Cologne, where once we left the bones of eleven thousand martyred virgins, our air force on Sunday morning dropped about the same number of bombs. I listened half consciously to the sound that reached me here - to the twittering of birds and the voices of children playing in the garden and tried to realise the meaning of these distant events. On the plains of the Ukraine two immense armies had fought to a temporary standstill and counted their killed and wounded. In Libya hundreds of armoured vehicles, a triumph of human skill, manned by technicians carefully educated for constructive work, churned through the dust and torrid heat in a fury of mutual destruction.”

Elsewhere, H. Caldwell Cook, the writer of perhaps one of the first text books on drama and theatre in education - the Play Way - wrote in 1915:

“Many thoughtful people claim to discern a conflict of principle in this war and they are much to be envied their belief. The issue is very complex, but it is certain at any rate that the war, with all its sacrifice it involves and all the nobility it has awakened, is being considered by those who rule our rulers as a commercial transaction on a consummate scale. It is the biggest deal on record. All the ideal aspects of this world commotion, the liberation, the choice of rule and the renewal of spiritual activity in the life of the peoples will remain to be undertaken by idealists and workers after military operations have ceased. A social revolution of some kind will be necessary in England after the declaration of peace on the continent; for even supposing some fair principle established by force of arms, it has still to be wrought into a living practice by right education and good government, For many of us the greater war is yet to come.”


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We might in the light of today’s proceedings ask ourselves how co-incidental is it that the presentation of the Gulbenkian report to the House of Lords was on precisely the day that the invasion of the Falklands Malvinas was declared? That the 1950s motivation for stimulating creativity in American schools, and the prominence of the work of J. P. Guilford stemmed from the Russians being the first nation to put a human being into space? That one of the fashionable initiatives in school management is the ‘collaborative’ - the verb leading to this concept having been used to describe traitors in war - which led to them being shot. That our daily language of Local education authorities - and arts bodies for that matter - is riddled with the language of ‘officers’ and ‘inspectors’ to describe staff roles? Are these yet more signals of the technology, the culture, the system of 'terror' that employs judgments, comparisons and displays as means of control, attrition and change?

We continue to live in unprecedented times with unprecedented challenges and need to remind ourselves of the importance of sensation in an age which practices brutalities and recommends ideals.

Professor Robinson, you have a long and industrious career in the field of arts education - and more latterly in something you call creative and cultural education. The charge against you is that your legacy from All Our Futures is nothing more than a means to consider and discuss creativity in education which has no place in the very heart of our educational project.

For me however, if the charge against you can only be built upon the premise that all you have done is encouraged people to think and reflect - then this is an admirable outcome. If we are able to preserve in our children the vividness of their sensations, an education through - what I unapologetically have called, now call and will continue to call - art - then we might succeed in relating action to feeling, and our reality to our ideals. Your work, and that of your colleagues, in contributing to this refinement of thinking, to the refinement of feeling and the refinement of action, should stand proudly alongside the work of other contributors who have graced this hotel over the years. For that, I judge you are guilty as charged.

However, I have one caveat to leave you with today: the language of the military leads us to ignore the specific implications of the arts in creativity. It becomes increasingly important now to have a more specific discourse about how different arts function within education. We must step back from the pedagogy of cultural and creative education, back further from the pedagogy of arts education and revisit more specifically the pedagogies of drama, music, dance, poetry, visual arts, film, photography education if we are to counteract the language of the military and the culture of performativity. Idealism would then no longer be an escape from reality: it would be a simple human response to reality.


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