Because you are the Secretary of State for Education, you have more power invested in your office than almost any other minister, so you could, say, decide all 11-year-olds must know what the subjunctive is, even though your own hired team of experts says there is no real subjunctive in English. “Such objections don’t matter,” you could say.
And because all the old checks and balances – local to balance national, professional to balance executive, research work to balance ministerial hunch – have been wiped out, your random thoughts can become policy.
Let’s say you had a thought about sport and your thought was: “Hockey is fun. I enjoyed hockey at school. All schools should do hockey. I’m going to find £300m to give to schools to pay for hockey sticks, goal posts and hockey coaching.” Hey presto, hockey would be policy. Whether this was the best way to spend money on helping all children use their bodies, or encouraging exercise for life, would be set to one side. Policy is whatever you decide.
Same goes for the arts. Your schools minister, Nick Gibb, announced that what the arts in schools need is £300m to be mostly spent on music. This is no more wrong or right than saying, “Wouldn’t it be great if all children played hockey?” What’s missing in both cases is some thought about why we do these things.
My first question to you, then, is why do you think we teach the creative arts in schools? After all, your government has placed great emphasis on the “knowledge-based curriculum” derived, it seems, from the thoughts of people such as ED Hirsch Jnr. All the anecdotal evidence I’ve heard suggests that one of the consequences of this move towards “knowledge” is that the creative arts in education are being squeezed. I take it that Nick Gibb is acknowledging this.
If you and your colleagues were honest about this you would boast, “Of course we’re squeezing the arts out. In the competitive world of globalisation, we need English workers, professionals and managers to have knowledge of the best that is known, not some vague nonsense about making your body look like a tree or what would happen if we painted grass so it looked purple.”
I can see that since the days of Michael Gove, you folks have to avoid such confrontational statements. You just got on and implemented “knowledge” policy while making emollient comments about the arts and saying such things as how much you loved being in the choir when you were at school (your predecessor, Nicky Morgan).
So, what are the creative arts for? Why might it be a good idea to spend time on them in schools? And why does dishing out money mainly for music miss the point?
We have many ways of interpreting the world and our place in it. One is to break things into manageable chunks (analysis); give these categories; explain causes and origins; make comparisons, generalisations and predictions. This is sometimes called “higher order thinking”. To help us do this we have the disciplines of maths, history and physics, using, say, observation, experimentation and abstraction.
This has enabled us both to create civilisations and destroy them: buildings and bombs, sewage systems and pollution, hospitals and genocide. Clearly, we not only need knowledge, we also need ethics.
You can teach ethics in at least two ways: you can tell children what you think is right and wrong, and/or you can try to conduct schooling on ethical lines. By the time you’ve done all this, there may not be time for the arts, unless you think they offer something else, such as “a way of interpreting the world through making and doing”.
The arts can be done without (or before) us doing much analysis or prediction. We can do a lot of it through imitation. Though we call it that, imitation always involves some variation. Quite often that’s where the fun lies for both artists and audience: it feels fresh, and make us see ourselves in new ways. Making and doing will in all cases involve transformation and change and can lead later to the analysis, generalisation and prediction you find in more formal methods of interpretation.
So with the arts we have a method of interpreting the world that can include everyone of all ages and may take us to higher order thinking. If you think this is important then you need an “all arts for all” policy, not a “music for many” policy.
But then, if your job included listening to people in education, as opposed to bossing them about, you’d know this.
Yours, Michael Rosen
