A pain in the Arts

Photo by Steve Wheeler

In yesterday's post about the BETT Show, I wrote about how people are the most important element of the massive education trade show. I met up with many old friends and colleagues during the 3 days I was at the show, and especially enjoyed catching up with some I had worked with during my time at Plymouth University. One, James Bettany, is still teaching there, and we spent a good two hours together reminiscing, and exchanging news. James mentioned to me that he intended to go to hear a talk on the arts in education after lunch, so I said I would accompany him. I'm very glad I did. It turned out to be one of the highlights of my BETT2019 experience.

The venue (which was far too small) was packed so full of teachers there was not even any standing room at the back. The reason for the popularity of the talk? It was a fabulous double act of writer and poet Michael Rosen, and Hollywood actor Jason Isaacs. In a session titled 'Literacy, Social Mobility and the Arts' the interviewer asked them questions about their early school life, their views on education and how they had managed to become successful in the arts world. The responses were pithy, challenging, entertaining and inspirational. Both were fairly scathing about the current government's management of the school system, and both in equal measure were critical about the state of education in particular.

Isaacs, who starred as villain Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter films, said: "It breaks my heart that children are required to sit day after day in classrooms, being taught sh*t they will never need, and then to be tested regularly on it." Isaacs said that although he had been taught at length about ox-bow lakes in school, he had never needed that knowledge in real life. Most of us could say the same - for me it was quadratic equations and sines, cosines and tangents. The curriculum could certainly do with an overhaul.

Rosen, who is professor of children's literature at Goldsmiths University, was equally belligerent about the way schools are required to focus on STEM at the expense of the arts. He argued that learning from the arts promotes analogy and reinterpretation. Rosen argued that these are important for whole brain development. "Somehow, we've lost that in arts teaching in schools" he added, concluding "You can't predict when or where you'll need the arts to help you interpret your world - but you will." 

Both complained that current governments are more interested in the metrics of success - where measurement of the observable is considered important, but that unmeasurable and unobservable outcomes are being ignored. It is in the unmeasurable, Isaacs believed, that we find the skills and attitudes we all need to thrive in society. Both talked eminent sense about their view of what education can, and should be, and in their entertaining interactions with each other, left the entire audience with the impression that there is a great deal of work to do to reform a broken system, but that teachers can make a difference in keeping the arts alive in education.


A pain in the Arts by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.