Intelligence is proportional to population but talent appears not to be

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

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  three days of playing music in a band