Talk about the arts in schools for the Royal Academy.

Let’s begin by looking at these two pictures. The one on the left is called 'Thor battering the Midgard Servant' and the one on the right is a scene depicting some of the characters from Shakespeare's 'The Tempest'. 

They belong right here in the Royal Academy. Thanks to the RA for reproducing them. 

They’re both by the artist Henry Fuseli. He lived from 1741 to 1825.

He was born in Zürich, Switzerland, the second of 18 children.

In, 1765, he visited England, where he supported himself for some time by miscellaneous writing. Eventually, he became acquainted with Sir Joshua Reynolds, to whom he showed his drawings. Following Reynolds' advice, he decided to devote himself entirely to art. In 1770 he made an art-pilgrimage to Italy, where he remained until 1778, changing his name from Füssli to the more Italian-sounding Fuseli.^[1]

Early in 1779 he returned to Britain, In 1788 Fuseli married Sophia Rawlins (originally one of his models), and he soon after became an associate of the Royal Academy.^[1] The early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, whose portrait he had painted, planned a trip with him to Paris, and pursued him determinedly, but after Sophia's intervention the Fuselis' door was closed to her forever. Fuseli later said "I hate clever women. They are only troublesome".^[2] In 1790 he became a full Academician, presenting Thor Battering the Midgard Serpent as his diploma work.^[3] In 1799 Fuseli was appointed professor of painting to the Academy. Four years later he was chosen as Keeper, and resigned his professorship, but resumed it in 1810, continuing to hold both offices until his death.

What has this got to do with anything we’re discussing today?

Well, one of my key words for this talk is ‘interpretation’. 

We might say that all art, and all commentary about art involves interpretation. By filling you in on a few details about Fuseli I have already affected your interpretation of the pictures. I’m guessing that now I’ve told you Fuseli’s dates, some of you are slotting the pictures into your mind’s filing systems to do with the years around 1800, other artists you know of. You might be thinking about Switzerland, or about Joshua Reynolds. You might be thinking about what dangers - or perhaps what delights -  lay in his way by way of clever women.  Or what a jerk he was to say that thing about clever women. 

There’s another aspect about these two pictures that I can mention: - as with thousands of others in the western traditions - Fuseli has used the medium of graphic art to interpret two works of literature. 

I’m guessing that most people here will be familiar with at least something of the literature that Fuseli has interpreted in these pictures. Thor is very popular these days because he’s one of the Avengers. In another form, he was the Norse God of War. His name was taken to make Thursday - Thor’s Day. 

The other day I watched the ‘Graham Norton Show’ and Chris Hemsworth, who plays Thor in the Avengers,  was on the couch talking about how he has collected three or four of the hammers that he’s wielded in the films. Also on the couch was Paul Rudd who plays Ant-Man in other movies , Kit Harrington who plays Jon Snow from the TV film-series, Game of Thrones and Julianne Moore who plays all sorts of people in many different types of films. (I wonder if Fuseli would have thought her clever and troublesome.) Kit Harrington said that he has a giant statue of himself which he doesn’t know what to do with. Graham Norton said he could bury it in the garden and years later people might come along and find it, and wonder what had been going on. Thor said that he tries to put the hammers on the mantlepiece but his wife takes them away. He then said his son picked up one of the hammers and asked him if it was a toy. ‘No,’ said Thor, ‘that’s the real one.’ 

So, the Norse myth was meeting Marvel Comics meeting Game of Thrones, and the relative reality or unreality of film-set props from the Hollywood version of the Norse myth. There are a lot of intertwined narratives going on there.

I’m not sure how the Norse myths made their way into Fuseli’s consciousness. I knew them well from one of my favourite books as a child, an anthology of the tales by Barbara Leonie Picard. I can re-tell - or interpret - them because of my memory of them. In fact, when I’ve been put on the spot by my children to make up a story I’ve secretly plundered the myths for story-lines and motifs. Rather as Hollywood does - and if there’s time - schools can help children do: be like Shakespeare - steal a story, adapt it, change the setting, switch the gender of one of the lead characters, add in a sub-plot and you’ve got a hit. My favourite Norse Myth when I was a boy, was the one sometimes known as the Binding of Fenrir. Fenrir is a giant wolf, and a key moment in the story involves a test of courage: the god Tyr puts his hand in Fenrir’s mouth as evidence of the gods’ good faith in binding Fenrir with what looks like nothing more than a garland of flowers. I won’t spoil the story other than to tell you that Tyr’s name was taken to give us Tuesday - Tyr’s day. 

These little interconnected anecdotes tell me that stories don’t just begin and end. They exist in chains of memories, re-tellings and interpretations even to the point where some end up on our tongues every day - quite literally as days of the week.

Fuseli painted this picture in 1790 and it was, as you heard,  the one that enabled him to become an Academician right here. 

Let’s look at the Tempest.

Here we can see Prospero in the middle and the two natives - and two slaves - Ariel and Caliban. 

Can we take it that that’s Prospero’s daughter standing behind Prospero there? She’s called Miranda, who gives us the famous phrase ‘Brave new world’ - which in the play is a line of great irony as the world she is looking at is  neither ‘brave’ or ‘new’. It’s made up of people full of old world cowardices, rivalries and treacheries. 

In both pictures Fuseli has interpreted stories. 

This was a high status activity. 

Because Fuseli was so good at it, according to the tastes and attitudes of the day, it enabled him to be accepted in the top artistic institution of the day: this one we are in right now. 

I’ll ask a rhetorical question here: if what Fuseli was doing was a high status activity then, why isn’t it a high status activity now in education? 

What else might we say about these pictures? Do you think both have a heroic tone?   These heroes, (both in their own ways magical beings - can we say ‘super-men’?)  have been positioned centre stage, mid-action, one striking down the serpent, the other commanding his slaves, the heavens and the seas. 

If you know The Tempest or the Norse myths you’ll know that other scenes and interpretations are available. The myths offer us the figure of Loki who as the god of fire can create mischief and wreak havoc. The Tempest gives voice and space to a native’s slave revolt which draws into the rebellion the servants of the aristocrats who are occupying the island. Several times I’ve put Caliban’s words ‘This island’s mine’ in poetry anthologies and I’ve written about Caliban in my book about Shakespeare that I wrote for young people.  

These are all interpretations of mine. 

I’ve just demonstrated then in the first minutes of this talk how looking at these pictures has set off trails of thoughts and opinions about the Norse myths and The Tempest. 

----

My central argument today is to say that: 

a) what Fuseli has done here by painting scenes from literature, 

b) what I’ve done in the past with the stories that Fuseli has drawn on

and 

c) what I’ve done right now, musing on how these stories exist in me and in popular culture

are the kinds of activities that are being squeezed out of primary and secondary education. 

----------

How is this being done?

It’s mostly as a consequence of what the government calls ‘accountability’. Schools are locked into a system of testing, inspections and league tables. These are all high stakes because the governance of a school depends on them: children’s scores in tests are aggregated and tracked over time. If a decision is made that the school is inadequate, it can be forced out of local authority control and become an academy. Or, if it’s already an academy it can be forced to become another academy. 

No matter what one thinks of this as a way of managing schools and managing standards, you can see that the whole apparatus rests on testing children. 

It’s legitimate then to look at the tests themselves and ask some questions:

I’ll restrict this for the moment to primary school children. 

Firstly: What kinds of knowledge do the tests test?

Secondly: What kinds of effect on education do these tests have?  

This may sound tautological but I’ll start by saying that the tests only test what is testable according to the kinds of test they are. By this I mean that they are pencil and paper tests which ask children questions for which there are only right and wrong answers. 

This tells us straight away that there are whole areas of knowledge that are excluded. (Just to be clear I mean knowledge that is both know-what and know-how.)

I’m sure you could think of some too. Here are mine: 

How to save someone’s life

How to feed someone

How to be compassionate

How to co-operate with others

How to be brave in the face of people being over-bearing, bullying or who persecute you.

How to hold two equally valid ideas in your head at the same time. 

How to plan.

More specifically, if you look closely at the questions on a SAT paper you’ll see that quite specifically, there is only one possible answer for any one question. This is from last year’s SATs paper for 10 and 11 year olds. 

The children were asked to read a poem. They were asked: 

“The experience of the last line could best be described as: amusing, or shocking, or puzzling, or comforting?” 

The marking guide that the teachers use to mark the test show that only one of these words is “right”. Notice  in the question there’s a passive construction:  ‘could best be described’. Could best be described by whom? Who is this Best-Describer Person? On what basis does Best-Describer Person come to their conclusions? I’m getting a picture here of a great god Best-Describer roaming the world of poetry tests who always knows best. Perhaps Fuseli could draw it for me. 

It is through passive constructions like ‘best be described’ that passivity is taught. The passive teaches passivity. Children are asked to accept that an unknown, unchallenged and unchallengeable authority runs poetry. 

Hey, I thought it was poets who run poetry but what do I know? 

Actually, when I read the test question,  I had two subversive thoughts:  first that none of the words on offer “best described” the last line. I could think of some others that I think are better. But as it was me doing the test (in my mind) I remembered the rule: I must not think of other words. I must not think of other words. 

My other thought was, those words on offer in the question could  - at a push - all describe the last line. That’s what poetry is like. The words in a poem slide about, full of ambiguity, suggesting one thing which, if true, might suggest something else which might suggest something else on down a chain of meaning. 

In fact, nearly 90 years ago, William Empson wrote a book which showed us just how ambiguous poetry can be and often is. 

Poetry is not a store of right and wrong facts. To treat it as such - which this SAT test does - is to distort and wreck poetry. 

The reader of a poem is not someone who takes specific lumps of meaning out of a poem as if they are taking eggs out of an egg box. If I take that metaphor further, I’d say, well if they are eggs, you can’t actually use the egg for much until you open the egg up and cook it according to your taste and culture - what are you going to have: scrambled, poached, fired, boiled, omelette? 

In other words, interpretation. We make meanings. 

That’s just one question. 

Multiply that many times - not just in terms of that test. Think now of the second of my questions:

What kinds of effect on education  do these tests have?

One direct effect is that children spend hours and hours and hours doing practice testing. In other words, the test-method (or test way of thinking) is instilled into children as being the best way, the only way, the authoritative way of doing things. 

Here’s my ‘Guide to Education’

Guide to Education

You get education in schools.

To find out how much education you get,

the government gives you tests.

Before you do the tests

the government likes it if you are put on 

different tables that show how well or badly

you are going to do in the tests.

The tests test whether they 

have put you on the right table. 

The tests test whether you know what you’re 

supposed to know.

But

don’t try to get to know any old stuff like

‘What is earwax?’ or ‘how to make soup’. 

The way to know things you’re supposed to know

is to do pretend tests.

When you do the pretend tests

you learn how to think in the way that tests 

want you to think.

The more practice you do, 

the more likely it is that you won’t make the mistake

of thinking in any other way other than in

the special test way of thinking.

Here’s an example:

The apples are growing on the tree.

What is growing on the tree?

If you say, ‘leaves’, you are wrong.

It’s no use you thinking that when apples are on a tree

there are usually leaves on the tree too.

There is only one answer. And that is ‘apples’.

All other answers are wrong.

If you are the kind of person that thinks ‘leaves’ is a 

good answer, doing lots and lots and lots of practice tests 

will get you to stop thinking that ‘leaves’ is a good answer.

Doing many, many practice tests will also make it

very likely that there won’t be time for you to go out

and have a look at an apple tree to see what else

grows on apple trees. Like ants. Or mistletoe. 

Education is getting much better these days

because there is much more testing.

Remember, it’s ‘apples’ not ‘leaves’.

---------------

But there’s another effect:

i) how this kind of testing, 

ii) the preparation for this kind of  testing, 

iii) and the accountability model of testing, inspection and league tables

 are transforming the timetable.

Here are some observations from some teachers I asked:

My college has cut A level Dance, Film Studies, Music... more pressure on working class students to take business type subjects, and more academies with 6th forms hanging on to a level students.

Our college has cut btec music, and A-level music, dance, drama, textiles and graphic design. Combination of factors including low recruitment (as a knock-on from smaller number of students taking up creative subjects at GCSE) but probably other factors too.

I’m not a teacher but my year 4 son’s English is only marked for spelling, grammar and neat handwriting. Ideas and creativity are never commented on so it’s hard for me to persuade him its worth bothering. And art projects seem designed only to provide classroom decoration. Kids are given very specific instructions, so are basically just colouring in.

As a child aged 10 we did pottery with a kiln and glazes, acrylic moulding cutting and polishing, watercolours, woodworking, marbled paper making and calligraphy. My daughter at the same age does colouring in. They made something out of air dried clay but it broke by the time she got home.

They brought in EBacc which excluded the Arts, and Progress 8 which all but eliminated them. The schools that have struggled the most to retain the Arts are the same ones that struggle to achieve the limiting data figures that are supposedly so important. The greatest threat they have is one that has been wielded across all disadvantaged areas, if you don't meet the data targets then Ofsted will tell you you're failing your students, place you in special measures and the DfE sell you off to the highest bidder.

I work in a special school and have been pressured to cut out creative arts almost completely. A few years ago, my timetable included plays, music, art, reading and writing for pleasure and fun poetry. Now my managers want evidence of progressive writing and worksheets, as these can be assessed for data.

My secondary school, in a socially deprived area of Newcastle, now has NO music at KS3 or 4 and no music teachers employed, for the first time in my 23 years there ...

In 2014 3 pupils took A level music. One was my son. Two others transferred in from elsewhere. By 2014 A level music was cut altogether. Because of this my younger son went to a large non selective state sixth form college to do music. This establishment has mow cut it. The other large state sixth form college in our town to offer A level music still offers it but it is highly selective. Neither one of my boys would have done well there yet one is currently working in the creative industries as a musician/creative, and the other is doing a music degree at university. They got their A level music qualifications ‘just in the nick of time’. They would not have the same opportunities if they were a year or two younger.

My secondary school tries to still offer creative arts GCSE and A level, and to offer extra-curricular music and drama. But, due to pressure mainly from the English department, students in yrs 11 and 13 were banned from taking part in productions. The last year they were allowed to take part, when they missed part of an English lesson for the dress rehearsal, when they got back to the lesson they were told how many marks they were likely to have lost as a result of missing a lesson. No credit given for the benefits to their English development of taking part in a performance.

In Y11 students not achieving targets just get Maths, English and Science lessons.

I'm a secondary Art teacher and we have had KS3 art lessons reduced from 50 minutes a week to an hour a fortnight. Additionally from next year there will be a 2 year key stage 3; in total this means that students will receive 36 hours of art if they don't opt for it at GCSE. They will also have a 2 year GCSE which means that they will complete their GCSE in year 10. Obviously as students mature they are capable of higher level skills. I'm not looking forward to being invited to explain why the results are poorer than previous years....😠

So what are these children and school students missing out on? 

Or put this another way: 

what can arts in education, arts in schools offer children and school students:

In an ideal world they can offer:

trial and error without fear of failure

a chance to explore materials or aspects of the material world,  whether that’s your own voice - through eg singing and speaking

your body - through movement, dance and acting

or the materials like clay, wood, iron, plastic, stone,glass

or materials like pencil, charcoal, paint, pen, ink, paper, canvas, film, video and so on. 

or language which can only manifest itself materially through  voice, print, digitally produced signs and so on.

every artistic act starts with possibilities for change, it enacts change, it changes materials, it offers possibilities to the maker and to the viewer.

By the way:

I tried to express this idea with a little poem:

Take a brush:

the sky is green

the grass is blue

you are purple

the house is silver

the river is gold

the sun is black

the world has changed.

Did you do that?

What I didn’t express in the poem is that in changing things we change ourselves. We are never the same as we were. 

We discover that we are not passive receptacles, we discover that we have the potential to change things.

A good deal of art involves co-operation of some sort - some more than others. 

A good deal of art involves us seeing things as others see them. It often involves making comparisons between how we see things and how others see them. The events of the 20th century tell us that this is desperately necessary if we are to avoid destroying each other or the planet or both. 

And let me come back to that word ‘interpretation’. All art - not just Fuseli and the rest who interpret across art forms, involves some kind of transformation of what’s already there whether that’s language or all the different kinds of materials I mentioned earlier. 

But interpretation is also a totally valid practice that takes place off the back of art. 

This is not the ritual of what the exam boards call retrieval, inference, chronology and presentation.

Interpretation involves using the available resources of our experience and, more specifically, our experience of other art forms and texts. 

One of the key parts of this is what we might call ‘storying’. You show me a story - or fragments of a story - as with Fuseli’s pictures - and I’ll tell you a story. This exchange of stories that goes on every day of our lives is how we form the foundation of our abstract thoughts. In fact, it’s not just storying, it’s analogising. In order to story off the back of one story, I have to select one aspect from the story in front of me, and compare it with one aspect of a story that is in the story-library in my mind. I make analogies. The moment I make analogies, I am beginning to categorise, generalise and classify.  

I would suggest that that is precisely what Fuseli has done here. He has categorised Prospero or Thor as a type - as selected from Fuseli’s library of types sitting in his head. 

Categories, generalisations and classifications are highly prized in education - at least at the level of being told what they are, as when we are asked to read and learn:  “The following are types of erosion, the following are types of triangle, the following are types of figurative language.”

But what value do we put on the ability to do this through interpretation, through storying and through the arts?

Stories: why it's important to ask questions that don't have right/wrong answers

In the book, 'Where the Wild Things Are' by Maurice Sendak, there's a moment where the main character, Max, wants to be 'where someone loved him best of all'. This comes after he has tamed the Wild Things. The word 'someone' is one of those words we have which are 'indeterminate'. They tell us something but nothing in particular. 'Someone ate the last chocolate'; 'Someone sent me some flowers'. In other words we think that a human being is involved (though possibly a pet dog in the case of the 'chocolate'!) but we don't know who.

When we read a book and come across a word like this, it is an example of 'Reveal-conceal'. Something is revealed but we don't know exactly what. Authors hope that by using words like this it will 'hook' the reader into wanting to know more, to be curious and to keep reading. Such words express the kinds of doubts that we all have as events roll out in our own lives. Eventually, with certain kinds of fiction, we hope that certainty will be restored, we will find out who that 'someone' is. There is another kind of fiction e.g. modernist fiction along the lines of Kafka novels, where the indeterminacies are not resolved. People started writing novels like this in part to demolish what they saw as the naive and false notion at the heart of conventional fiction that everything does work out in the end. The modernists' were saying, in effect, no they don't. 

In 'Where the Wild Things Are' some people take the 'someone' to be Max's mother. This is possible. 

I'm going to pose some other ways of viewing this.

We only hear of Max's mother at the beginning of the book. She is the recipient of Max's threat that he'll eat her up. She is the person who sends Max to his room. Being sent to your room is a classic case of what the psychologist Bowlby called 'detachment'. When we are growing up, we are engaged in a set of attachment-detachment mini-dramas. Parents and children go through a kind of dance where we do things like demanding affection (attachment) or pushing people away (detachment) or a mixture of both. We have 1000s of ways of doing this verbally and physically. 

Max is aggressive at the beginning of the book, so it's a kind of extreme verbal detachment. He is going to be so detaching he is going to make his mother disappear (by eating her). By sending Max to his room, the mother detaches physically. 

I'm going to suggest here that within the drama of the book, (psycho-drama, if you prefer), Max has 'tested' his mother and at the point of being in his room, he  does not 'know' that his mother loves him unconditionally. Are there limits to her love? And he's found the limit? Let's leave that hanging. 

Now come back to that phrase 'he wanted to be where someone loved him best of all'. One way to think of this, as I said, is to just assume that this is his mother. Another way is to think of it as meaning he wanted to be where anyone loved him best of all. In other words, it's a yearning for the kind of unconditional love that he didn't get when he said that he was going to eat up his mother. The word 'someone' is to indicate that he just has the yearning feeling. 

Another way - even more extreme - is to think that perhaps Max had someone else in mind. The word 'someone' doesn't help us resolve this. Nor should it, necessarily. The book was written in the 1960s after 50 years or more of modernist writing in which these kinds of indeterminacies can often be found. 

When Max gets back home from the land where the Wild Things are, there is a bowl of something hot waiting for him. People often take that to be a kind of symbolic offering of love from...his mother. To think this or say this involves several assumptions: that his mother is the maker and bringer of hot food; that to make and bring hot food is an act of love; that to make and bring hot food is an act of forgiveness and/or unconditional love.

All fine. These are possibilities. Again , I'm going to suggest another one. What if, yes, we are right to assume that it's the mother who has brought the food, but rather than it being an act of forgiveness and/or unconditional love, it's an act of 'staying detached'. It is after all, just an object. Of course, we can express emotions through giving and withholding objects. But is it, we can ask, significant that the mother is not visible at the beginning and the end of the book? So when Max is described as wanting to be where 'someone' loved him best of all, that matches the indeterminacy of us not being able to 'see' the mother, perhaps in a kind of imitation of how Max feels: that he cannot 'see' his mother. 

In the end, then, we know the mother through her sending Max to his room, as possibly the person who left him some hot food, and possibly being the 'someone' who loved him 'best of all'. 

On the other hand, perhaps the book is a reverie, an exploration on attachment-detachment and that Max is discovering the limits of this in relation to his mother. The word 'someone' then is a pivot to the whole book: he and us quite genuinely don't know if the person who loves him best of all is his mother. All he knows is that that's what he wants. Whether he's entitled to it - or do any of us indeed ? - is another matter. 

Now, let's imagine some kind of test on 'Where the Wild Things Are'. The tests I'm familiar with (English schools SATs for 7 and 11 year olds) have questions which can only be right or wrong. These are tests in 'retrieval', 'inference', 'chronology' and 'presentation'. You could make up some questions in these fields for 'Where the Wild Things Are': how many Wild Things are there? Why did Max get into a boat? What did Max do after he had tamed the Wild Things? What goes on, on the pages where there are no words? 

But what if you asked 'who is the someone' in the phrase 'where someone loved him best of all'? There is no definite answer. We might say that it's likely that it's his mother, but I think that would miss this general point I am making that perhaps the significance of the phrase is that he wants to be where 'anyone' would love him best of all. More than that, I'm going to argue that a discussion  about this word 'someone' leads us into much more significant places than retrieval, inference, chronology and presentation. We need to give space and time to children to have these kinds of discussion about the 'indeterminate' moments in books. 

If this interests you,  you might find it interesting to take any forms of fiction or poetry or drama and ask questions of moments in any of them were a determinate answer is not possible. We could summarise these as 'Hamlet questions'. They are the 'why didn't Hamlet kill his uncle?' questions. 

One way to access these kinds of moments in stories is to ask questions like:  'is there anything about this moment that makes you think of a moment like this that has happened to you?' Or, 'is there anything about this moment that makes you think of another moment like this in another story, film, book, song, TV programme, comic?' 

How do we find out what a book means?

Language is symbolic just as symbols in paintings are. We have invented 'signs' (specific sounds and shapes on a page) to indicate meanings. But we build up those meanings through shared activities. The meaning is in our history of how we shared activities.

Every time you read a poem to yourself, you interpret it in your mind. Every time you read a poem out loud, you interpret it with your voice and your face and people listening hear that and interpret that expression in their minds.

The word on the page is connected to print and paper. It's separated from our bodies. When we read words out loud, or move to the words, we reconnect the written word to the body as it is in speech. We connect meaning to our whole person: poetry, song, story-telling. Reconnect.

Every time you freeze frame a scene from a book, improvise, act out, perform a play, you make movements and sounds which embody meaning. These reconnect words, phrases, sequences, language with our whole being. To move is to make a bridge between print and thought.

Comprehension exercises teach us that 'getting the meaning' from a page is like taking eggs out of an egg-box until it's empty. But when we read and ask our own questions, the box is never empty. We can go on finding new meanings and changed meanings.

Put another way, the meaning is not the egg. It's what we do with the egg: scrambled, poached and then eaten and tasted and used by our bodies. Meaning is not in the page, it's how we interact with what we think is on the page. Meaning is interaction and transaction.

If meaning is interaction and transaction, we should think of ways which foster interaction and transaction: talk, performance, debate, discussion, 'I wonder why...', 'I wonder if...', 'do you have questions to ask?', 'how does that feel?', 'What does that remind you of?'

Comprehension:

'Billy has a blue hat'

What colour was his hat?

'Blue'.

CORRECT

'It was raining'

Why was he wearing the hat?

'Because he supports Chelsea.

WRONG

But it's not wrong. It's one meaning amongst several.


This is an inference exercise. But who decides 'what is inferred'? What would be the point of literature if there was only ever one inference? Why did the king's horses and king's men try to put Humpty together again? Is there only one answer to that question?

Literature is full of things that aren't definite. 'Hamlet' opens with 'Who's there?' At that moment we don't know who's there. That's the point. There is no answer to the question 'Who's there?' We might think of possibilities but we're going to wait and see.

On some stage sets, we don't even know where 'there' is. The meaning of the space will be made through the words and actions of the people on it.

The reason why the word 'inferred' was adopted by the National Curriculum was in order to restrict it to right and wrong answers which can be marked. Our inferring and interpreting of literature is not as narrow and restrictive is that, otherwise there'd be no point in reading.

Interpretation - 'getting meaning from texts using our knowledge, experience and awareness of the world and other texts'.

Instead of teaching ‘inference’ - as if there is only one meaning, we should be teaching ‘interpretation’: how we find and make different possible meanings.

The Value of Arts-based Learning

[This article was written for a brochure ‘10 Years, Barbican Guildhall Creative Learning’ published in November 2019)

(In this article I’ve made some words ‘bold’. They are, if you like ‘key words’ which I think are important in helping us understand what the arts are, what they’re for and why they’re important’. )

I’ll begin with some questions: 

how do we know about the world around us? 

how do we know who we are? 

how do we know about how we fit into the world about us? 

how do we know how we think? 

how do we get to know about how others think? 

how do know about how our forbears thought about these things?

These are important matters. If we don’t ask them, we are passive; we accept what is given to us; we hand over our rights as human beings to others. If we look at those questions we can see that they are about our survival, about how we might co-operate to survive and about the meaning of what we are doing here. 

Science helps us with some of these questions. It does this by coming up with hypotheses (what ifs),  testing them and if they appear to be valid, seeing if doing the same tests again we come up with the same results. The results of the sciences have produced the world we see and use. The arts come up with hypotheses too but in general the arts are much less interested in seeing if these what-ifs are ‘valid’.  And the arts are mostly not very bothered about whether exactly the same results turn up again and again. In fact, they are usually more interested in results being different rather than the same.

The arts may not start off by trying to answer that list of questions. It may be that the answers start to happen when we produce art, take part in it, or ‘receive’ it in some way or another as an audience. 

How do they do that? 

And what do we mean by ‘the arts’ anyway?

The core idea with the arts is some kind of making or doing. The making and doing will nearly always involve producing something new, and it will nearly always involve taking something that is already there and changing it. The phrase we can use for that is ‘transforming sources’ and this connects us to ‘change’. But what do we change? That depends on which kind of art! 

Dance changes the body. We change the shape or speed or rhythm of our bodies or the amount of space we take up - and much more - when we dance. 

To make music we change sound using scraping, tapping, blowing, plucking or changing our vocal cords. 

To paint or draw we change pens, brushes, paints, pencils, paper, canvasses. 

To sculpt we change stone and plaster and other materials. To make other visual art pieces we can assemble objects - humanly made or found in nature. 

To write, we change language and express this with our voices, computers, pens, paper. 

To design, we change design tools and materials to come up with shapes that can be used to construct things. 

To make films we use machines to capture sounds and images and string them together in sequences. And so on.

This tells us that one of the thing we do when we practise the arts is we play with the materials we change. Some might call that ‘investigating’ materials. We investigate paint, we investigate language, say. This helps us to find out what is possible. What is possible to make and do with the ‘stuff’ that we are changing?  (‘Possibility’ is an important word in the arts too.)

Every time we take part in the arts, we start with something that is already there. We learn from what has gone before, whether that’s the materials we use, the stuff we find, or what other artists have made before us. As we get to work, we learn things about ourselves like ‘what is possible to make or do - given I am who I am?’ ‘what is possible for this group of people to do - given that the group is this particular group?’ 

This means that at the core of the arts are discoveries: discoveries about what the ‘stuff’ we are using can do, and what we can do as individuals or together.  

This is exciting: it’s about our potential as human beings: our potential to think, to imagine, to be, to do and to make. It’s about how we can extend our minds and bodies beyond what they did yesterday. 

So if we go back to those questions I began with, we can see that it’s through experimenting with the ‘stuff’ we use that we can indeed begin to find some answers:

How do we know about the world around us? - If we play with ‘stuff’ we find out how it works, what shapes we can make with it, how fast or far or glittery or wobbly or smooth it can be - that’s about the ‘qualities’ of materials.  (And much more of course!) 

How do we know who we are? - If we play with stuff we find out what kind of people we are, how confident, how sad, how angry, how careful we are (And much more!)

How do we know about how we fit into the world about us? - If we play with stuff we can relate what we do to what others are doing and how they do it. 

How do we know how we think?  - As we make and do the arts we can listen to ourselves thinking. As we say to ourselves, ‘I’ll try that, I’ll experiment with that, we can also ‘monitor’ ourselves thinking, or remember how we were thinking as we were making and doing later, after we have finished the work of art. Memory is often important in art: the memories we use as we make the art, the memories of making the art, the memories of other people’s art.  These memories are a major part of who we are, and how we behave in the world. Taking part in the arts helps us find out what these memories mean, what matters, what’s good, what’s sore, what’s bad, what’s warm.

How do we get to know about how others think? If we work with others, we co-operate through listening to others and hearing back from others what they think about what we say and do. 

How do know about how our forbears thought about these things? If we look and hear and study the works of others we get insights into how people thought about all these things before us, whether that’s from something made yesterday or 3000 years ago. 

Over many years I’ve worked with the Barbican Guildhall arts team with thousands of children. We’ve explored many of the arts: painting, sculpture, poetry, stories, music, video. This has nearly always involved working in several art forms at the same time, often being an audience one moment and then making something new in another medium. This takes us to that all-important word ‘interpretation’. How might we ‘interpret’ some photos by writing poems? How might we ‘interpret’ the stories of our families’ lives by making models? This is a form of concealed abstract thought: picking out elements in one art form that we can express in another, finding themes common to both but expressed in different ways. 

All this work has involved huge amounts of co-operation with artists from many genres working together to enable children to see the possible, saying in effect:‘you can match what we try to do by trying to do things too.’ 

Teachers and parents who see their children over time have told us many times that they have seen their children feel excited and fulfilled by this kind of work. It is a way of thinking about yourself as a producer, a co-operator, a person looking for possibilities, looking for what can be done with the ‘stuff’ they’re working on. 

This tells us something profound: when we change the ‘stuff’ we use, we change ourselves. 

I’ve been very lucky in my life because from the time I was very young to now, I’ve had time and space in my life to both be an ‘audience’ to the arts  in theatres, art galleries, cinemas, or with books and listening to stories and songs but also to make the arts that suit me - poetry, plays and stories. I ‘use’ the arts to help me understand the world and to help me understand other people to help me understand myself, and to help me see myself in the world. 

For the last 45 years or so I’ve also been lucky enough to have had the pleasure of helping children make and do the kinds of things that I’ve been doing. I’ve seen them discover possibilities about themselves and my work at the Barbican Guildhall Creative Learning has been a huge part of that. It has affected what I write, how I write and how I work with children.  

3. Alice in Wonderland - The Ditch

'I would like to see these scribes,' Alice said to Mr Comings-and-Goings, 'where are they?'
'I sent them to the House,' Mr Comings-and-Goings replied eagerly.
'Let's go,' said Alice.

Together they scurried down a straight, wide road till they got to an old, tired palace full of corridors and uniformed servants. 
'We go into the gallery,' said Mr Comings-and-Goings. 'I sit up here so that I can signal to Johnson what he has to say.'
'Doesn't he know himself?' Alice asked.
'Of course not,' said Mr Comings-and-Goings contemptuously. 


The moment he opened the door into the gallery, Alice heard and felt a great roar and babble of voices. She looked down and saw hundreds of people all talking at the same time, waving bits of paper, standing up and sitting down, snorting and snoring, sneering and jeering, slapping and clapping. Some were making sheep noises, others pointed and performed exaggerated nodding movements. Others shook their heads and smacked the palms of their hands on to their faces. Yet more made repeated appeals to the ceiling or beyond to the heavens. 

Alice looked more closely and she saw the sneery cat Mogg, who was stretched out along one of the benches waving a paw in a languid sort of a way. Nearby was Johnson the dog who was shouting even louder than everyone else. 
She caught him saying, 'And I would suggest to you, quo quis quint, nevertheless...er....er...quint quis quo.'
The brought huge roars of approval from the people behind him.

'Why are they doing all that...all that...?' Alice's voice petered out as she tried to think of a word to describe what she was looking at.
'Don't you think it's marvellous?' Mr Comings-and-Goings said, with his eyes gleaming.
'No,' said Alice, 'not really.'
'Oh well,' he said, 'you wouldn't understand. The worse it gets in here, the more Johnson can say that he's saving us.'
Alice was still puzzled.
'We keep saying it's a "zombie parliament",' Mr Comings-and-Goings shouted over the top of the noise, 'and my dog Johnson is going to save the country from the zombie. It's marvellous,' and he clapped his hands together like an excited child.
'Can we go now?' Alice said, 'I thought we were going to meet the scribes.'
'Well actually,' Mr Comings-and-Goings said, 'one or two of them are just sitting further down the line from us, but most of them are waiting in the Lobby for me to give them some Anonymous Sauce,' and he pointed down to the big Anonymous Sauce bottle in his bag.

As they got up to leave, Alice heard amidst the din a louder shout from one side of the House shouting, 'The Ditch! The Ditch!'

'Why are they saying that?' Alice asked.
'Oh  you don't want to know that,' said Mr Comings-and-Goings.
'But I do,' Alice said in her usual curious way. 

When they reached the Lobby, the scribes rushed up to Mr Comings-and-Goings like eager chickens clustering round a farmer at feeding time. He responded by handing them the Anonymous Sauce and they soon drank it up, apart from one who, like the group in the House, kept saying, 'The Ditch! The Ditch!'

Alice went over to her. 
'Excuse me,' Alice said, 'what is this ditch? Where is it?'
'Aha,' said the woman, 'it's actually not a ditch. I mean, it's a ditch that is both a ditch and not a ditch at the same time.'
'Can we go there?' said Alice.
'In a way, yes, and in a way, not.'

The woman led Alice out of the House and very soon they got to a sort of a drain or gutter.
The woman pointed at it.
'Is that the ditch?' Alice asked.
'It's "a" ditch,' the woman replied.
'I see,' said Alice which in all truth wasn't true. 
'When might it be "the" ditch, then?' Alice asked again.
'October 31st 2019,' said the woman very clearly.
Alice looked closely at it.
'What will happen then?' she asked.
'Johnson is going to come along, lie down in it and die.'
'Oh,' said Alice suddenly feeling sad for Johnson. 
'No, no, no, no need to sound sad,' said the woman, 'it's never going to be a ditch. It never was.'
Alice really was confused now.

Just then, a bunch of the scribes rushed past, with Anonymous Sauce round their mouths, shouting 'Zombie parliament! Zombie parliament!'
Alice watched them.
'Don't they want to know about the ditch?' she said.
'Not any more,' the woman said, 'the ditch was yesterday.'

Alice stood and wondered. The ditch was going to be October 31st but it was also yesterday. 

How very, very confusing, she thought. 

Reflections on difference between Johnson and Corbyn in PMQs,

Johnson displays all the mannerisms of someone who had a lot of space and time to learn a particular way of performing . He extends sentences through repetition and illustration, full of 'fillers' like 'er...er' delivered in non-hesitant way as if even the 'er' has authority. He is happy to string 'oral formulas' together - long established rhetorical devices and mannerisms that he would have learned in debating societies at school and university. At the heart of all this is a kind of role-play. He imagined himself being the speaker and performer he is now, and role-played it for many years. We might call it 'entitlement' - and it is - but the entitlement is brought about through a kind of play, playing with what he thought he could become. One indication it's a 'play' is that one of the routines of debating societies in posh schools is that you're encouraged to take up positions you don't believe in: you just play at it, for that particular debate - and then switch.


Corbyn, on the other hand, clearly doesn't behave as if this particular kind of debate is what he's done a lot of. His tradition of speaking in public is the meeting, single speeches, trying to convince people of a particular way of thinking, a particular politics. A combination of him and his team are pursuing a line that what Corbyn should do at PMQs is just patiently make points. He should be as accurate as possible, citing examples and statistics. This is essentially legalistic in tone and method and though it is in its own way 'performative' it isn't the kind of performance that comes from speechifying as combat between posh boys, and the 'debating society'. Corbyn's use of words and speech comes from the idea that you speak from conviction or belief and not from role-playing.

Just to be clear, none of what I'm saying here is necessarily about 'effectiveness'. They are observations about why their two methods are so different.

Alice in Wonderland at Number 10 - the Sauce

2.


In fact, Alice changed her mind, and before leaving found herself alone in the room with the ever-furious Mr Comings-and-Goings. Her eyes drifted towards the table where she was surprised to see a large bottle full of some kind of liquid.


Oh, she thought to herself, I wonder if this is anything like that peculiar drink I had before. She looked to see if this bottle also had a label on it saying, 'Drink me' . Yes it did, but this time the bottle bore another label, saying: 'Anonymous Sauce'.


That's funny, she thought, the sauce bottles at home say 'Stokenchurch and Wilmslow Olde Englishe Sauce', but this one just says 'Anonymous'.


She reached out for the bottle, but Mr Comings-and-Goings spotted what she was doing and said with a rather alarming tone of voice, 'That's for the scribes, not you.'


'Can I try some,' said Alice, 'after all, it does say, "Drink me" on it?'


'O very well,' said Mr Comings-and-Goings, 'I firmly believe people should do what they want.'


'Do you?' said Alice.




'No,' said Mr Comings-and-Goings.


Alice reached forward again, took the bottle into her hand, opened it and sipped a tiny amount. It had a strange, tangy taste but even as she had that thought, something stranger started to happen: she heard herself say things that she didn't think.


'...it's been revealed that Mr Dominic Grievous Bodily Harm, who had been at the Party, eats children...'


'Why did I say that?' Alice said interrupting herself.


'I did tell you that it was meant for the scribes,' Mr Comings-and-Goings said with a knowing smile.


She wondered who these scribes were and asked him so in her usual direct way.


'Here!' he said crossly and pressed a button on a box at his side. A voice came out of it speaking in clipped but confident tones.


'...it's been revealed that Mr Dominic Grievous Bodily Harm, who had been at the Party, eats children...' the voice said.


Alice could hardly believe her ears. Wasn't this what she had just said? She glanced back towards Mr Comings-and-Goings.


He was still smiling but was now looking with great fondness at the Anonymous Sauce.


'It's like playing a musical instrument,' he said more to himself than to Alice, 'we feed them the Sauce, they say the words...'


"Well, I shall tell them,' said Alice, 'I will warn them that they are saying things that they don't think. And it's just you and whoever cooked this Sauce who are doing this.'


'And who, in the whole wide world will believe you or will care?' said Mr Comings-and-Goings, 'you really are a foolish little girl.'


I'm not, thought Alice, I really am not, and resolved to find these scribes and tell them what was going on.