The State of the Arts

What was it about Bowie?

David Bowie was undoubtedly a national treasure, an outlier who became embedded within our cultural DNA. I wonder whether, in some future times, children will read about him, listen to him or learn to play him. His passing reminds me of the passing of Elvis in a way that Michael Jackson, for example, didn’t. Cultural impact aside it is clear from the messages across social and mainstream media that he was valued across the social spectrum.

What was it that we valued about Bowie?

For sure, we could all make suggestions but I doubt we could measure them unless you were his accountant.

Many are concerned that we live in an era of measurement. Some suggest that, unable to measure them, we unwittingly devalue the things we so obviously value. The ingenious among us might even suggest this is an opportunity to create a new set of more sophisticated and, of course, expensive assessments. Measurement is an extremely valuable business inhabited by major league players flexing a monetisation point within state education while simultaneously driving content delivery. It is our preoccupation with measurement that causes concern amongst those worried about arts education.

Concerns and arguments about devaluing the arts have often been well reasoned. By inserting bias into the system via incentives that include official endorsements by way of Ofsted certification, EBacc compliance and so forth, it has been compromised.

For those concerned with the maintenance of objective educational standards based on testing, there is evidence suggesting teacher-centred practices such as direct instruction, rote learning and memorisation yield more consistent results. This could be seen as positive news if in the near future, increasingly mediated by robots and AI, content delivery and testing could be efficiently provided by computer.

Systems based around adaptive learning and analytics are improving all the time and as more of the AI and heavy-lifting is passed to the cloud we’ll see exponential improvements. In Brazil, digital learning startup, Geekie are already deploying a technology solution to this challenge. I met co-founder, Eduardo Bontempo, when I was in Sao Paulo meeting and interviewing interesting educators and activists for Learning Reimagined. It’s early days but this kind of solution is attractive when your challenge is to ensure inclusive and equitable access to quality education. After all, that is one of the Sustainable Development Goals that we are committed to.

The question then remains what the role of the teacher may be in such technology-centred environments? Some may see that the luxury of human knowledge specialists may be burdensome against financial KPI’s. The entrepreneurial educator may seek to amplify their practice by codifying it into these digital platforms, building their student numbers like followers on Twitter.

Which brings me back to Bowie and what we value.

Human or machine coached, in subject data then tested for retention quality control, there will always be another kid in another nation with better qualifications that will do your kids job for a tenth of the money.

I haven’t heard many people ask for less arts or less access to the arts in our children’s education and yet the inserted bias has, perhaps unforeseen, consequences. A report from Warwick University in 2015 showed, “there had been a significant decline in the number of state schools offering arts subjects taught by specialist teachers”.

The well-heeled will no doubt supplement their child’s learning with private tuition or other access to the arts such as dance, music, drama and so forth. If we concede to a tighter focus of valued subjects within our schooling system are we sure that this then is the “inclusive and equitable quality education” that was intended by the UN?

The argument supporting a tighter focus on subjects is easy to understand. Let’s get the measurable basics sorted before we worry about providing a comprehensive education. It’s a matter of priority, so if the things we value in Bowie are the things we find difficult to measure then they are going to be dropped. That doesn’t mean that they will disappear but it does mean that there will be sections of the community who are not included. If one buys into the “cultural literacy” theories of Hirsch then why ignore this group?

I’m told that creativity will always find a way and I think that’s probably right. I’m not convinced that schools set out to kill creativity and an argument that says we won’t find another David Bowie unless we change misses my point. It may be that we’d like to find superstars who can create unicorns for investment bankers.

Innovation happens when there are more dots to join up. Bowie saw and communicated the world as a result of how he joined up the dots, a product of the British art school tradition. Isabel Sutton, writing for the NewStatesman, described art schools as “a place where the socially and intellectually marginal could distinguish themselves.” Sutton argues that, unattainable entry requirements and ballooning costs are making them “a dwelling place for commercial interests and the children of the international elite.”

In the end it depends on what we want out of our schools and what field of vision we want our children to view the world with before being accepted as an adult. You can’t build an education system around outliers, although some in Silicon Valley are having a go, but you can think about what kind of systems present the best opportunities for people to live well in the world.

I’m not sure that reciting your times table at the age of 11 is the only metric in town but nevertheless perhaps easy to measure.