Welcome to the intelligent 20s, or why Art Teaching isn’t ready for the new era

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We are at the turn of a decade, a point in the calendar that people use to celebrate and reflect. It helps us regulate our lives by referring to waypoints in that span of 80 odd summers through which we wander. We use significant numbers in the calendar to help us look forwards while reflecting back. So many people write things about the past decades happenings and others write about what the next decade will bring. This thought piece takes a longer view.

1919 was the year that the Bauhaus was founded and around the same time Marion Richardson was starting to change things in her profession (art teaching) in England. The Bauhaus redefined Western art and design education. It nailed shut the coffin lid of the pre-modern, in the verdant openness of the Weimar Republic, its curriculum and teaching was forged in the white heat of the burgeoning world of mass production and technological determinism. Back in more mundane Dudley, Richardson was also creating the new, devising new curricula for teaching school children art, but in a uniquely child-centred way.

As an artist and teacher who trained at the end of the 1980s (in Birmingham where the Marion Richardson archive exists), I was immersed in the philosophies and practices of both their teachings and they have served me well in pedagogy and practical situations. Thinking about the turn of the decade though it occurred to me that it’s now over a hundred years since these thoughts were developed and since then they have been the dominant principles in art education. The more I thought about this, the more I began to realise that the ticking over of the “century-old marker” is as good a time to reflect whether we should move on as any other significant event. My question is this, isn’t a hundred years enough for a set of philosophies to hold such deep sway? These approaches were forged, post world war 1, in an era of unprecedented change and in many ways we are similarly about to see society change in another radical big jump. So do we need to change again?

Outside the art world, society is about to really deep dive into a world of intelligent assistant led work and home life, climate change, artificial intelligence, neuroscientifically driven behaviour, robots (self-driving cars are robots), more extreme automation, whole industrial sectors (such as banking) operating autonomously, hyper-personalisation, mega cities, autonomous businesses, mathematical behavioural prediction, tribal and angry politics, the death of consensus, people as data, the rise of data backed psychology to mass manipulate us, and even commercial space exploration is becoming real.

In education we really ought to start to question what schools and teaching and learning are actually for in the computationally-mediated decades ahead and in the context of this new society, what do we actually need them to do?

For art teachers this is potentially actually both easier and more difficult. Our approach to art teaching is shaped by the two modern giants as mentioned earlier, yet the world outside is changing so much. At the two poles, it will be more easy because the skills we teach will rise in importance and yet more difficult because the context in which those skills are needed is not something that most art educators are close to understanding. The world I described above is what one may consider science fiction, but it’s not, it’s real and it’s happening fast. I know, in my current day job as a Principal Digital Architect, I design systems that enable it.

What can art teachers teach kids who will spend their lives working alongside robots and who have to change career every few years? What skills will art teachers need to teach within this emerging world as the pace of change speeds up and upheaval becomes the norm? Most art colleges teach “how to use technology” yet few produce graduates who can actively shape technology. Mostly their lecturers are mired in the opinion that “being digital” means software fluency. They are teaching people to drive a car without teaching them how a car works and how to get the best out of it, let alone how to navigate and prepare a journey and deal with the lifecycle of the car. And so many other technologies are now available to artists from neuroscience to bio art, to materials, to bacteria, to artificial life. Most art teachers reading this will have no experience of any of the above yet Some artists are already starting to engage as a medium and other Artists like myself mix up hard tech and traditional forms. On top of this we now see the rise of push-button art, where with a few simple interactions, art is made for us like self driving acts drive us. So why do I think this future world needs artists to be taught differently? The Neo liberal commoditisation of Art has resulted in a dead end of bipolar cultural sterility whereby Art is either worth money or it’s done because it makes you feel good. In fact the future needs the critical and intellectual skills of art education in deeper more profound ways.

This future world I describe will require people with well-honed intellectual skills in psychology, computing (NOT digital), creativity, mental agility, numerical and logic proficiency, and ethics but in horizontal criss-crossing threads not vertical subject-based silos. Above all it will need people who can challenge technology in novel ways and who can see things differently. We all know the slogan Think Different, the future needs us to be able to See, Hear and Feel Different. We need three dimensional articulate thinking people to get the best out of machines. This is not something the current system can produce. This ain’t because teaching isn’t good, it is, but it’s predicated on near hundred years old tenets.

Teachers of art and design will have to retool what they teach and how they teach in order to weave threads that move through the fabric of peoples’ ever-changing lives. How will we teach designers when designers have to be able to handle the data that feeds the decisions taken by the design AIs and their role changes to become akin to a shepherd guiding the intelligences? In the emerging world, various forms of mathematics will be something that both forms and shapes the contours of peoples’ lives and because of that, art teachers will have to teach to a society that throws up many strange attractors and multiple unexpected emergent systems and properties. The notion of what is artistic could have radically changed again within the next twenty years as it did after 1920, these changes are that epochal.

Art teachers need to rapidly reskill understanding deep tech not surface tech, they need to understand more philosophy and how to operate in a world where their children operate across silos, where boundaries don’t exist between subjects and where this third presence of intelligence is now working alongside us. They will also need to feed into their approach, the changes wrought on our understanding of art and creativity wrought by the explosion in neuro scientific research. Once we actually know what creativity actually is, how will we change our approach to teaching it?

The Bauhaus approach that guides much of what is taught will have to give way finally. The child centred approach of Richardson will have to become child and environment/community led and art teachers may not have to be artists or designers. The crucial role of art-skilling that is so badly needed as a vital part of this new economy may have to be taught across traditional subjects. How will they adapt and how will art teacher education adapt?

The age of mass production was one of power, control and certainty, the coming era is one of mathematical chaos, systems and emergence. The art teachers of the next decade will have to tackle and work out how art works and how to teach art for this new age of unnatural intelligence.

3 Replies to “Welcome to the intelligent 20s, or why Art Teaching isn’t ready for the new era”

  1. Creativity is what we do . Humans creat an epistemological based reality which contextualises the material world. Consciousness is the result of the process. The human condition is consciousness and place is unknowable because our world is a quantum residency.

  2. For me creativity is an attitude to art, which enables us to further develop our own ability and talent. But to do so, we must challenge technology, the artistic process and empower through a greater understanding of materials, theories of colour and form, principal methods and the influence of nature.

    Bauhaus’s experimental workshop school, emphasising craft, originality, individuality of expression and formal art training, modernised, might be a good starting point to get art teaching ready for the new era.

  3. For me creativity is an attitude, which enables us to further develop our own ability and talent. Art teaching must continue to challenge the artistic process, technology and empower through a greater understanding of materials, theories (colour, form etc.), principle techniques, methods and the influence of architecture and nature.

    Bauhaus’s experimental workshop school, emphasising individuality of expression, craft, originality and formal art training, modernised and digitalised, might be the answer…

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