Guest blog written by Craig Dunk .
I had the pleasure of hearing Seth Godin passionately and humorously explain the concept “We need ‘Artists’” as a keynote speaker recently. If you are in the Information Technology field you may be familiar with Seth as an author and speaker and if you get a chance to hear him speak I strongly encourage you to do so.
The thesis resonated very well with me and many of the audience members hearing the keynote at Educause (an Information Technology conference targeted at Higher Education). You’ll note that the word “Artists” is in quotes because for the purpose of the keynote Seth did not mean visual artists or performance artists per se. He used the phrase “artist” to distinguish the activities from those tasks which are proscriptive or perform functions with a known outcome.
In talking about this Seth was adding his voice to the observation that the future needs of the societies in our world are unlikely to lie with repetitious tasks. So while many economists and pundits take the position that this means we should be educating children to work in computer science or other knowledge economy jobs rather than manual labour Seth and others are pointing out a more subtle point and that is the work people will do in the future is likely work that is being done for the very first time. Therefore it is not enough to learn how to perform a particular task in school: you have to learn how to adapt and learn how to do something for the first time. In Seth’s words to learn how to be an artist.
I was pleased to see he also acknowledged that being an artist was not an ivory tower or even a core academics type skill that is often promoted to the neglect of other courses or pursuits. He noted for example that the reception staff have two sets of function, the repeatable one of routing calls would have been for him “not art” and is often seen as replaceable by technology, but, the other function of solving problems and making people feel welcome was a dynamic problem and required a new response to each person and situation. So he explored briefly the concept of “Receptionist as Artist”.
However, while Seth is a great speaker his domain of expertise is marketing and internet technology and a 30 minute presentation does not allow time to fully explore the topic of how the idea of being an “artist” relates to different jobs, careers and interests. In fact one of the best explanations of this is by the author Matthew Crawford in Shop Class as Soulcraft where he talks both about what kinds of pursuits can be unexpectedly gratifying and immune to repetition (and therefore as a side effect remain economically viable; though the core thesis is about fulfillment rather than economics).
Being the conference was directed to teachers Seth also tied this concept back to how and what we teach children. In doing this Seth echoed many of the concepts of "factory education" explored by Sir Ken Robinson in a video on the origins of our education system. What both speakers suggest is that we are often working in an education system that provides answers and not skills to ask important and hard questions. Seth cites an example of speaking to a class of grade 4 students and bringing in a “drinking bird” toy. When he asked them how they thought it worked, they all pulled out their pencils and then waited for him to impart the answer. An “artist” to Seth would not wait to be told about something; they would explore.
For me Seth Godin and Sir Ken Robinson and Matthew Crawford make a compelling case that social and community resilience and individual fulfillment is served better by taking a lot of different paths to education, embracing a variety of approaches and encouraging questions over answers.
And that is our challenge as teachers and parents, how do we create environments that are not just about the facts and the specific skills but the ability to be independent to explore your own world and feel comfortable taking the risks that artists need to take.
