WHEN HERBERT MET KEN: THE 100 LANGUAGES OF CREATIVITY
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 Owen
University of Hull
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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.
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:
“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.
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:
“… 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 programme[1]”.
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” “thetruth 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 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: