The return of 'High Culture' and the Death of Art Schools

 

Two recent articles which fit seemlessly together to show the parlous state of arts education GB.

Low morale devastates art colleges:

Britain’s creative future is under threat from the admin culture that is wrecking our best schools, buy cialis claims artist…
Vanessa Thorpe, viagra arts and media correspondent Sunday February 10, search 2008 The Observer ….

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/news/story/0,,2255311,00.html

From today’s BBC…

Children promised ‘high culture’ 
 
Culture – widely defined – “enriches lives” the government says. Schoolchildren in England are being promised access to high-quality cultural activities and the chance to pursue creative careers
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7241460.stm

This is a fascinatiing insight into how disjointed and frankly bankrupt present government thinking is on the subject. Right hand knowing what left hand doing situation….

Anybody unfortunate enough to have been through the coffee-grinder of present day ‘arts education’ in practice…..i.e. pour students in one end set the grinder to maximum profit and pour out other end will recognise everything Crowley says as being true. In fact it such a truism there little point in stating the bleeding obvious. Our art-schools are now run by administrators and to misquote our very recent Arts Council boss ( who spent less days in post than Dwain Chambers has in American Football) what do you get when you have a policy of ‘garbage in-garbage out’ as long as profit margin high…exactly….

As the educational standards of the student body have fallen so has the inevitable standard of tutoring due to cost-effective slashing of contact time. To get more than an hour of effective contact time is the exception not the rule of our beautifully housed institutions…if only as much money spent on education as on flash buildings, consultants and PR we would not be in this mess…

Then the clincher…as these institutions start to sink like a batch of Titanics sent into an ice floe we hear good news….

The Government is going to instigate ‘high culture’ on a scale unseen since the Blitz. Avid children are going to be lead like donkeys to sites of cultural significance determined by the revisionist Culture Vultures at the Department of Let’s turn the clock back to the 1950’s. The latest statement smacks of the kind of elitist twaddle that cultural snobs from both sides of the house but especially the right wing have been moaning about for years.

High Culture…….the BBC article shows a ballerina…typically….the unwashed masses are going to be dragged away from their game-boys and little ponies ( kicking and screaming I expect) to enjoy…..ballet, theatre, opera….and if too unruly they will get the community arts second-best route..rapping, singing…making a film…all the X-Factor generation teasers they need to become the disappointed generation all over again. When Further Education colleges already filled to capacity with failed plumbers and hairdressers who think they now graphic designers or potential pop stars we are once again only storing up more failure for the future.

The economy is crumbling as outsourcing to more talented, better educated Indian and Asian operations continues apace.

The areas of ‘High Culture’ will continue to be dominated by the cultural elite ( i.e. The Middle Class) who been doing this for years…in their own time and money…they very good at it.. ….and the better schools already do it. This is a feeble ‘democratic’ attempt to erase ‘difference’ that doomed to failure. Instead it will create more division, more resentment and more anger as children are shown a glimpse of the ‘promised land’ then have the door shut in their face.

£25 million on pilot schemes alone is promised …the Arts Council spawned quangos are rubbing their hands with glee…what the Arts Council and the Olympics took away the Schools will reimburse and keep the Volvos full of poster paints bringing ‘culture’ to the sink estate reservations moving towards enlightenment……..IF they can find the time in curriculum and the money ( small details I know)…

Laughable…

Meanwhile the hundreds of genuine charities, fine arts organisations and dare I say it theatres everybody been wringing their hands about…will they be saved by this noble scheme?

Will they hell…

More under-educated students driven by false hopes into more failing courses that slide off the production line into jobs that no longer exist because we did not address fundamentals in our education system because we too busy mortgaging our school playing fields and infrastructure to public-private initiatives so that things ‘looked better’ whilst forgetting to get what being taught inside the buildings right first…

Yet more castles built on somebody else’s sand. Until the fundamentals flagged up in Crowley’s complaints addressed we will have nothing to lead our darling youngsters toward….

Meanwhile the mediocre ‘participatory’ clowns and jugglers will lead the funding straight back to the middle class domiciles to fund their childrens far better education with extra trips on top…..lovely jubbly…win win situation…

This initiative will fail because like Child Benefit it will have to be applied universally….

It is bad news for the disadvantaged poor youngsters who will be led into the realms of high culture and told to dream until they get too noisy or have their mobiles taken away….After all we know what ‘High Culture’ is and we are going to use it…

Where have we heard that before…????