Be careful what you wish for

In the past, public debate has sometimes been intense, scandal has occasionally flared, while at the beginning of the 21st Century British art occupies a vivid, albeit unstable, position in the spectacle of media and celebrity that defines contemporary culture. Not so art education. Its literature and its debates are overwhelmingly the property of those with a professional stake in it. This has both positive and negative consequences. On the one hand, considerable moral and practical commitments are involved; on the other, a stultifying mix of territorialism and myopia can shroud the field. If the public at large does have an image of art schools, it lies somewhere between envious fantasies of student promiscuity and fear of having the wool pulled over its eyes by privileged narcissists escaping from the real world. It is hard to know what to do with all of this. Does one plunge into debate about assessment, quality control and benchmarking - thereby alienating all but the most ardent educationalists? Or does one scant the day-to-day hard work and the conceptual difficulty for a confection of egos and advertising, of dedicated pedagogues, bright young things and the vitality of the fashion industry - thereby becoming complicit in the myth itself?

I do not know the answer to these questions. What I do know is that for good or ill, I am a product of that very system and must perforce weave the truth - and the biases - of that experience into my account of art education. What I also know is that how a system reproduces its relations of production is both crucial to its continuation and central to its identity. More than 25 years ago, I wrote a long pamphlet titled The Politics of Art Education with a colleague, Dave Rushton. Both of us had been art students in the 1960s and 1970s, both of us involved initially with Conceptual Art and later active in its political/cultural diaspora. The point of mentioning this is that when I now look back on that text, two things strike me. One is that its rhetorical voice comes from a different world. Both post-war social democracy and the Reagan/Thatcher/Brezhnev Cold War, as well as their would-be revolutionary critics (of whom we were two), are separated from the present by a gulf as deep as that which separated those times from the 1930s. Yet the second thing, strange to say, is how little has changed. The voice of management, and the equal and opposite choruses of the rational planners and the creative free spirits, drone on undiminished. They say you should be wary of desire lest you are granted that which you wish for. The elevation of modular over linear teaching programmes, the educational incorporation of theory, the breakdown of modernist medium-specificity, the critique of the (mostly male) expressive author, perhaps even a questioning of the authority of the western canon, were all songs in our radical repertoire. Yet the fact that these have come to pass, and now count if not as the norm, then as significant components of a contemporary education in art and design, has counted in the end for less than the fact that the underlying structure (and of course, the wider structure-beyond-the-structure) has remained intact.

This text is an extract from his essay 'Between God and the Saucepan: a study of English art education from the 18th Century to the present day', which will be published by Tate in the History of British Art this November.

Paul Wood is senior lecturer, art history department, Open University.

This extract was reproduced in Art Monthly's special issue on art education, October 2008/ Issue 320, p10-11.

Go back to the debate about art education