Creativity Money Love - Introduction
November 2011
The revolution is being televised: every day in the news we see radical changes being enacted around the world. It is also being digitised, and people are finding new ways of doing things for themselves. Two areas where change is happening at a frenetic pace are in the education system...
Tomorrow's world today
November 2011
Excellence and enjoyment, skills based curricular, knowledge based curricular, enquiry based learning ...everyone has their opinion as to what we should be teaching today's children. But many forget that today's children will not be adults in today's world, they will be adults in 'tomorrow's world', a different place, with a...
Connecting learners with museums - what are we waiting for?
November 2011
Museum worksheets have a lot to answer for. ‘Can you spot the cat on the far wall? How many places are set at the table?’ When I was a child worksheets in museums were relatively new, a valiant effort to reach out to younger visitors. Trouble is, they turned visits...
Piloting chaos with integrity and inspiration
November 2011
What did you and your colleagues want to achieve with this education? We have often considered the KaosPilots as a positive answer to youth unemployment but, to many, it has meant more than that: influenced human potential, moved boundaries etc. The KaosPilots was our vision of a fantasy education, one...
Creativity and education
November 2011
There are only two things that matter in the 21st century world: one is whether we can live with our planet; the other is whether we can live with each other. On a planet that could one day be home to up to nine billion people, there’s plenty of space...
It’s not just about the money
November 2011
Over the course of successive governments, education in the UK has been debated in terms which, deliberately or not, have reduced it to the realm of the economic and functional. Why should you do well at school? To win a place at a good university. And why should you go...
Creativity Money Love
November 2011
In his recent MacTaggart lecture the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, spoke of the energy and inventiveness of Victorian Britain as ‘… a time when the same people wrote poetry and built bridges’. Most of us want that kind of richness and diversity to run through our communities. We all...
Making a solar system
November 2011
Some time back in the 1980s when I worked in a local education authority, I remember visiting a struggling boys’ school. I was shepherded down a dingy corridor to the room where the meeting was to take place. The paint on the ceiling peeled, the blinds hung off the wall,...
The sheep conundrum
November 2011
From the point of view of our education system, creativity is a problem because it is chaotic. And systems abhor chaos. When we look around schools for our kids and see clean and tidy art departments adorned with carefully presented studies (or copies) of the works of ‘great artists’, we...
Creative learning for life, money, and love
November 2011
At present, almost half of the younger generation of Spain has no hope of finding an appropriate professional occupation. The situation is developing along similar lines in other European countries. It is no longer just the usual dropouts who lack any prospect of economic prosperity, but also an increasing number...
Every school should be a creative school
November 2011
Having worked with the creative industries in school through creative partnerships what I was struck by that the creative industries are outcome drive, the successful people in those industries are able to combine the self motivation, and discipline to work to a brief with a set outcome in mind and...
The case for creative learning in hard times
November 2011
In 1981, I was in high school in America, immersed in a curriculum scheme called ‘college prep’. This is roughly equivalent to A-level work in Britain, albeit with less flexibility: back then, if you wanted to be positioned for university consideration, you took courses x, y and z, no questions...
A little more learning by doing
November 2011
As well as being craft entrepreneurs and employers, around a quarter of designer-makers based at Cockpit Arts are part time tutors, technicians and visiting lecturers. This makes the theme of education, creativity and employment a rather hot topic in the Cockpit studio corridors. Opinion is divided on whether current course...
Singing songs of expectation
November 2011
Creative learning is the most effective catalyst for the vital life-chemistry of ambition, confidence and expectation. Creative learning unlocks expectation. It unlocks heightened expectation for young people of themselves. Even more powerfully, it unlocks the expectation which teachers, parents and carers have of young people. And those heightened expectations are...
The BRIT School – 20 years on
November 2011
The BRIT School is celebrating 20 years of a unique educational and industrial partnership. The only school whose capital funding derived from a pop festival (Knebworth 1889), it represents a partnership between the British music industry in the shape of the BRIT Trust and the Department for Education. From the...
Information plenty and knowledge famine?
November 2011
I am curious about knowledge, not in philosophical sense, but in a practical one. I worry about what it means to know something in a world that is increasingly complex, ill defined and interconnected: a world that demands that we develop, and that we ensure that our children develop, the...
The library as cultural enabler
November 2011
Louis from Lewisham is a cultural volunteer spending his summer energetically inspiring a group of children to follow his interest and engage meaningfully with the arts. He’s developing new skills as an advocate, promoter and mentor whilst also pursuing his own creativity. It’s the second year running he has chosen...
Reading, Wroughting, Arithmetic
November 2011
The Russell Group of universities has recently announced that the more practical subjects at A-level and GCSE will not in future be considered ‘challenging’ enough to count as prerequisites for entry to the top institutions of higher education. Meanwhile, the Secretary of State has publicly differentiated between the serious subjects...
Creatures of habit
November 2011
For several years, my younger daughter Iris, who is nearly seven, has made sure that I get up and sit with her while she eats breakfast, watches TV or reads a story. When I am away working, she doesn’t follow the same routine, but when I am there she insists....
The gift of ignorance
November 2011
I am ignorant. And for that, I am grateful, because the infinitude of things I don’t know means that I will be able to learn forever. And that, in turn, means that I can live a life of surprise and wonder. It also means I can approach situations with a...
Getting our playful natures right
November 2011
What if the playfulness that has always been a subterranean touchstone for educators since the Romantic period (from Rousseau to Froebel, Steiner to Montessori, Reggio Emilia to Summerhill) has become the Achilles heel of productive subjectivity? What if the regime of flexible production and knowledge management that typifies contemporary Western...
Creative learning through technology
November 2011
For the past few years, I’ve argued that, unless we’re prepared to become significantly more creative and imaginative in the way in which educate young people, the likelihood of them grasping the opportunity to fulfil their potential can only be enormously diminished. I’ve tried to promote the concept of innovation...
Good enough jobs and good enough workers
November 2011
Many of us who work in education, working with the graduates that will staff the cultural industries, would see it as our role to produce critical practitioners. This means not only having the skills and knowledge required to follow this type of work, but an ability to reflect on that...
Bedroom shredders
November 2011
Over the last three years we’ve been showing clients like Glyndebourne, the Barbican and the English National Opera YouTube clips of a young Spanish man, Achokarlos, sitting alone in his bedroom playing along to extreme heavy metal by the likes of Meshuggah and Deicide. http://www.youtube.com/user/achokarlos Now really, why would we...
From an EBacc to a MeBacc
November 2011
Whatever our worries about coalition policies, let’s be grateful to Mr Gove for one thing: his General Motors approach to education (‘what was good for me is good for everyone’) has mobilised a national debate about the purpose of learning. The previous government, despite the rainbows and manic policymaking, never...
Designing the future
November 2011
Design and Technology was introduced as a statutory subject for all pupils from ages 5 to 16 in the first National Curriculum in 1989. It was a visionary move taken by the then Secretary of State, Kenneth Baker, and, in the 22 years since then, a huge amount has been...
A new renaissance in learning
November 2011
I graduated in the early ‘70s. It should have been an era of mass factory education, following the post-war baby boom. At one stage, that era saw a new school opening daily in the UK. Every school had near identical galvanized steel windows. Yet when my partner was in the...
The human operating system
November 2011
Creativity is the way our mental and physical selves run for the realisation of our ideas. It is with this human operating system that we have evolved from cavemen pointing at mammoths to astronauts pointing at earth. Our fundamental instinct makes us determined to survive. The realization that collaboration improved...
Stories within the songs
November 2011
I remember little of what I was taught during my formal education. All those facts and figures learned by rote, gone. However, I do have an uncanny memory for almost every film, book, song and anecdote I watched, read and heard during that period. This isn’t because I was a...
Making and measuring difference
November 2011
If creative learning is the creation of one’s own ideas, or learning to create one’s own ideas – or even understanding that learning is the creation of new ideas – and if every human has the capacity to do this, then we are talking about something very significant and complex....