Intelligence is proportional to population but talent
appears not to be related to population numbers. I am living in the city on the
edge of the Rocky Mountains; the population is much greater than it was in
Shakespearean London, and almost everyone here is literate, and has many
thousands of dollars spent on his education. Where are the poets and
playwrights and painters and composers? Remember that there are hundreds of
thousands of literate people here while in Shakespeare’s London very few people
could read. The great art of this part of the world was the art of the native
people. The whites flounder about trying to be original and failing miserably.
Keith Johnstone
The above quote is taken from Keith Johnstone’s excellent
book called ‘Impro’ which is about improvisation and the theatre. Johnstone is
a playwright and teaches improvisation in a number of places including the
Royal Court Theatre. A lot of his work stemmed from his difficulty in the
education system and then his experience whilst training as a teacher where he
met the inspirational art teacher Alan Sterling. Sterling’s work seem to be
primarily influenced by the Chinese classic the Tao De Ching.
What seems to be problematic with education is not the
teaching of maths or the teaching of language or anything specific but the
parameters that are set in order to teach in a school, such as the chosen period
of history and the way that it is explained.
The contextual nature of education is the main problem, the
fact that children have to sit on chairs and do their work at tables, the fact
that they are not allowed to run around, the fact that they are not allowed to play
around , and of course this is a kind of programming and conditioning which is
dismissed as a form of lefty conspiracy theory but the fact is these things
have extraordinary control over people in a form of hypnotic arrangement of the
brain.
We have now arrived at the point where all of the schools
resemble some form of detention centre with levels of security that one has to
go through in order to get in but what does this actually do to the mind of a
child in education? Does it not say to them that the world outside is so
dangerous that you have to be protected from it? Does it not say that the
authorities are the only ones who can be trusted not even your parents can be
trusted that is why you have the ChildLine telephone number and your parents
have not been checked by an agency.
On the face of it these ideas seem to be okay but they are
not, maybe we need that sense of danger, a sense of risk instead of it being
mitigated out of our lives because what actually happens when you really do meet
the wild world outside? You do not have anything as a resource to fall back on.
My concern is in the area of musical and artistic creativity
and there is no way that you can be truly creative without dealing with the
real world, all I see in the world is a situation where no one is allowed to
fail and in order to ‘pass’ you have to conform to the criteria however how
many times in the history of the arts are things that were once considered as
the bench mark superseded by something that was considered unartistic or even
wrong? So is that an example of a system trying to perpetrate itself? I think
it is but in the arts it has a problem whereas in other areas it is more
resistant to change. We have lost that
creative pit unless there is social problems and one can see that in our own
life times the blues and rock boom coming out of the 50’s austerity into the
period of change in the 60’s and then the problems of the 70’s giving us rock
styles and then punk etc.
So Shakespeare’s London,
a den of thieves and criminals a dangerous place to be, full of Catholic
plotters hired assassins and great artists many of whom were also spies, mostly
for the Queen. Within that colourful world were a set of geniuses that set the
Tudor world alight, Shakespeare, Marlow, Francis Bacon, John Dee, Walsingham,
Sir Walter Raleigh to name a few.
Maybe this is something that Brexit may do again to England (because
in a few years it may only be England) things might be so shit that it will act
as a good fertiliser to the arts.
Vic
