Page 27 - Studio International - July August 1968

read ; there are others who are moons and through all education. To learn Latin or to once their eyes have begun to see, have been
suns, who tend not to speak much, whose learn Greek you've got to be, to a certain shown how to look . . ? but I'm cutting
hands rule their heads, and that is as it extent, accurate; to learn mathematics many edges.
should be. For it is with their hands that they you've got to be, to a certain extent, accurate I know, and about blackboard jungles.
have elected to work and yet their heads and but, ultimately, you teach yourself every- But there was a gentle English heretic once
eyes need feeding too. Ruskin got a thing you know. And, when you do, you are called Pelagius, much disapproved of by the
lot wrong but he wasn't wrong when he then accurate to the extent of your capacity. followers of St Augustine of Hippo because
proclaimed head, hand and heart are one. This moralistics has got a thing about he didn't believe in original sin. However
And this-1 can see I'm going to exceed my popularization : but all knowledge is pop- simplistic pelagianism is, however open to
two thousand words and I'm going to have ularization. We don't really know anything, Voltaire, or the next assassin, or the next
to telescope—is why I started with my own neither each other, nor what we're doing bomb, in education, in art education
sixth form. Very few people, even scholars, here, nor what the universe is, nor why—if, of particularly, it's the only approach that has a
are truly scholars. Scholars, like plumbers, course, it is. A bullying fool taught me chance, that we can afford.
are specialists society needs. They work on maths when I was twelve, introduced me to To bring it about is much simpler than
their particular edge of knowledge, defining physics ; now I go through my daughter's people think: to beat the problem of
it. Artists, great artists of all kinds—as homework with the Nuffield text books; she numbers you've got to take Socrates' grove
scientists—work on their particular edge of sees, she understands, she shows me again. and apply to it some of Prospero's magic
knowledge, extending it. Most of us are She's twelve; art students are seventeen, which is now available to us. Once you're
neither scholars, nor plumbers nor great eighteen, nineteen, twenty. They're mature, through the bureaucracy belt, what you've
artists, nor scientists. We're somewhere in even the ones who are most zany, difficult or got to do is to mechanize in order to human-
the vast scarred gorgonzola in-between. whatever (they perhaps most of all, in a ize, you've got to use teaching machinery,
What we need are connections, connections, private anti-way) ; the only way to teach simulators, the lot. Perhaps, before we all
connections, maps, guides: we need these them anything besides what they already have grey beards, we'll have pretty pictures
too, back to the interior, even if we are know they want to know is to make them in the magazines of what has been planned
working on a particular frontier of our own. want to know something else. I mean, who and could have been on the ground years
There's a confused moralistics, there's a can not be involved in Michelangelo or ago, an actual live 'Educational love' for an
fear, there's a lack of love which runs Caravaggio or even old smooth Lysippos, art school. Martin Shuttleworth

At this point in time vital and far reaching ened state of being for both the individual How can we legislate for the whole
changes must be made in developing an and the collective. They are quite right in dimension of sensation with the dimension of
individual and collective, moral
education sufficient unto the students and these demands and the country can afford meaning
ourselves. These changes relate to content; no less. and aesthetic so that the two dimensions
the very idea and form of what we mean by While the elements involved in the concept interpenetrate. Anton Ehrenzweig said, we
the difficulty
and want in education. of education remain much the same as they are all aware of these things
The present state of being has evolved have been, today the essential shift is where is to externalize a situation where this can be.
through new ideas being grafted onto the we locate the student in relationship to the There should be a unit or units that allow
old order, allowing far too many of the out- wide spectrum of possibility. He must be these possibilities.
worn attitudes and practices to remain. These central to the whole, having his own Shuttleworth's Central (educational) Core
static and linear concepts and attitudes are in essential rightness reaffirmed, within a could help to do this. The central unit
fact dead but linger on to clog the system, situation specially contrived to afford him should be aimed at establishing a milieu in
largely from the fear the idea of change the fullest use of available information. which students 'learn how to learn for
engenders. To place him in situations designed to themselves' and at the same time allowing
Now is the time for uprooting and planting develop self-knowledge and a personal and both staff and students to establish and
anew. The idea of Polytechnic allows this, more meaningful evaluation of phenomena select their own tradition. We would
perhaps the last chance for some time. in which greater credence be given to abolish the Fine Art Departments as they
The writings of Koestler, McLuhan, Gabor understanding, to the act of recognition and exist generally, in both name and aim,
and Ehrenzweig give us some clues, as to the act of doing. Simply—education must replacing them with Environmental-Light-
indeed do specific experiments and essays become the ritualistic of the total concept in Sound- Movement- Workshops, the motiv-
that have been made both here and abroad. action, allowing for the individual finding ation of which was the externalization,
Most importantly, so do our findings in art. and developing a personal iconography. examination and control of phenomena.
We support a 'living education' (anti- Hitherto it has not been 'open' and has not The essential essence will be the building
university) because it would accord with been 'total'. This form is not sufficiently of bridges between differing disciplines.
our own intent and aspirations, i.e. towards demanding of the student. It still smacks of This will demand an 'open' system. We
an education and environment that is the Grammar School feeding methods, and cannot lay on a culture, but out of the
sufficient unto art, both as an idea and as the university academic—all of which rightly qualities of the people involved together
reality. is being rejected now. Moralistic feeding or with open attitudes and suspended judge-
The 'new' education must aim to put a measuring is out. We have choice in this ments, it could be that we can establish a
student in a superior and more critical way matter. milieu that allows a 'culture' to grow and
of 'learning how to learn' for himself; in a Totalities are separate and yet not separate develop.
more open and imaginatively dynamic worlds, where the responses of all our senses This would allow for collective endeavour
situation. Both staff and students are aware are so interrelated that any one of these (ritual) of staffs and students. Such a unit
of this and increasingly demand this height- becomes, or is, simultaneously the other. would require, for example, a Physicist,
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