The greatest gift an education can provide is an enduring desire to learn

What would it be like if, instead of evaluating achievement at art schools, we decided to assess fulfilment? It’d be absurd of course - fulfilment is a perception of an internal condition and, as such, it can only be evaluated internally. But the question seems to point to the heart of the problem with grading (in art schools at least) since it exposes exactly the mismatch between two conceptions of the role that art plays: one of which is predicated upon notions of performance (or rather performativity) and the other upon ‘being’.

Just imagine though, if it were possible to gather a clear picture of how fulfilled students were with their studies on completing their education, what enormously valuable data that would be. And if it turns out that students have less interest in their chosen field than when they started, perhaps we should ask ourselves if we’ve failed to do what education should strive to do above all else: to foster their desire to go on learning.

References:

“Measuring Happiness – some practical advice for David Cameron’s latest idea.”

“Step outside the Rogerian circle” (Gail Kinman asks whether a condemnation of 'therapeutic education' examines all the evidence

The Failure of Success

I was interviewed yesterday by a colleague about the Co-Creativity of Hand and Mind research group that has recently formed at Gray’s School of Art. One of the questions was “Tell me about a failed work - Why was it a failure?”. If you follow this blog you’ll have noticed that I've written about failure quite a lot - I guess it’s because failure seems to be such a commonly encountered concept, and issue, in art and art education (and not just a concept: for some students it's a genuine threat). But when I began to think of my own failures I realised that these are relatively few and far between. I'm not saying I've never made mistakes, broken things or made things in the studio that didn't work or that I'm not proud of. On the contrary, I've made more than my fair share of such 'failures', but I realise that I don't actually consider these failures - they're just sketches, rejects, breakages or experiments. The only true failures I feel I've produced are the works that have been exhibited in public but that have broken down in some way or that didn’t function as intended. And even the works that haven’t failed technically, but which I’m not proud of, are not so much failures as simply not my best works.

But it's not really as simple as a few inferior or malfunctioning artworks, but rather the damage to my reputation that emerges as the real failure. Artworks can be repaired or replaced by better ones but reputation damage is much harder to salvage. You might well ask why I bother then to complicate the issue by making the kind of art that can break down or “fail” in this way - why not just stick with inanimate work? When I think back over my practice as an artist, it’s evident that I've tended to take fewer such risks in recent years. This might be thought of as an admission that I've become somewhat more risk averse in my middle age. Perhaps, but then again there is an alternative interpretation that one can take, and inevitably it’s the one that I will claim. In my youth the use of materials and processes that could recognisably fail - in the obvious sense of the word - meant that I had a clear yardstick by which my achievements could be gauged: if the work worked then it worked and whilst it might be conceptually or aesthetically flawed, at least I could feel that it did what it was supposed to do. The parameters of success and failure were therefore fairly transparent. And in a context where concepts and aesthetics are about as fixed and predictable as the British weather, a certain amount of control seemed to count for a great deal.

But 20 years down the line, I'm not so much in need of the reassurance of fixed parameters, so the potential for genuine failure (especially in terms of reputation harm) has become far less of a threat. I'm quite content with the ambiguity and contestability of conceptual and aesthetic success and failure; in fact it’s a liberation. I don’t see myself as risk averse - I just don't measure my artistic achievements by other people's yardsticks to the same degree any more. Now, I realise that this is no doubt partly due to the relative security of my position as a teacher, but on the other hand, I'd argue that I’m simply no longer concerned about failure because I'm no longer bent on success. As I've said here before, success is a false aspiration in my view - we'd be far better off aiming at fulfillment in life.

This brings me back to education - that set of institutions tasked with the responsibility of providing support, resources and guidance for learning but that also take it upon themselves to enshrine peoples’ future reputations in those impoverished forms of feedback known as grades and which, despite legions of highly educated employees, still chime in with the mainstream misconception that success is the pinnacle of achievement.

Talent

“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” -Stephen King

The comments from my last blog post have led me to brush up a little on Attribution Theory. Most especially I've been reading about Fundamental Attribution Error: the tendency to attribute the causes of behavior to dispositional traits rather than situational effects. For example, when someone spills something we tend to assume that they're clumsy rather than considering that the glass might be slippery or that they've been distracted by a friend or by stressful thoughts about a situation at work or at home.

So how does this relate to talent? Well, talent is principally something we attribute to others and it's also something we tend to think of as arising from internal processes rather than being produced by external factors. Whilst many people may believe that we can do little to induce talent, it's generally accepted that it’s possible to draw it out and encourage it (or the reverse). Teachers especially, are in the business of spotting talents in students and assisting their fuller development. In many ways teachers have the daunting responsibility of identifying underlying talents and guiding students to pursue them – in effect shaping the course of their lives. But at what point might the identification of talent be thought of as a fundamental attribution error? Perhaps Timmy just appears to be talented at maths because his older brother took a few moments to help him understand a few useful underlying principles and now Timmy enjoys maths more than anything else and is in advance of his classmates because of it. Perhaps Timmy had the temerity to paint on the classroom wall last time he did an art class and got told off. Perhaps he just likes the maths teacher. There are so many potential variables which contribute to the formation of each individual that to generalise by assuming someone is talented seems narrow minded at the very least. As we well know, teachers make mistakes, sometimes grossly. Consider, for example, the headmaster who said that a five-year-old Bertie would never amount to anything. Later, in Technical College, this same student was described as “a lazy dog who never bothered about mathematics at all.” Fortunately Einstein didn't take much notice of what these teachers thought, but many students lack such independence of thought.

Much as I agree with the above quote by Steven King, I think it also highlights a pervasive misunderstanding in contemporary attitudes which see success, rather than fulfillment, as the pinnacle of human achievement. Should we be encouraging young people to pursue their talents, that we have skillfully identified with our unique but untutored gift for talent spotting, or should we encourage what they find fulfilling? I fully admit that the two often overlap, and all for the better. But sometimes they don’t and we do students a serious disservice, much as it may break our hearts to see them squander the talents we perceive, when we encourage them, oblige them or subtly coerce them into pursuing routes which do not accord with their own desires.

But it isn’t only external perceptions that shape student achievements. Self perceptions also play a significant role in determining how individuals develop (though these perceptions are by no means immune to the influence of parents and teachers either). In various studies carried out by Carol Dweck and collaborators it was repeatedly found that students could be divided roughly equally between those who sought “learning goals” (increased competence) as opposed to those who sought “performance goals” (goals that provided favourable judgements or – crucially - the avoidance of negative judgements about their performance). These different goals were found to be predicated on contrasting beliefs about the nature of ability. Students who believe that ability is a fixed entity tend to seek performance goals and to avoid risk taking whilst students who believe that ability is alterable (ie: can be improved) are more persistent, relish challenges and see failure as an opportunity to learn (learning goals). Unsurprisingly these students also achieve significantly better results in challenging tasks. The upshot of this research has been a strong advocacy for methods of teaching that shift student perceptions of ability as a fixed entity to ones that see ability as malleable and therefore subject to hard work and determination. This makes a real difference.

Imagine the obstacles in Art Schools then, where many students have come specifically because school teachers have encouraged their unique talents? And what is talent after all, other than a stubbornly immutable conception of innate ability? No wonder you hear the word used so little in studio discussions or tutorials – it’s practically taboo. But that’s not the only obstacle art school teachers face. In this world increasingly dominated by X-Factor’s and Nation’s Got Talent shows it seems to be becoming increasingly difficult to persuade young people that hard work isn’t a sign of weakness but, on the contrary, is the road to mastery that even the most talented need to tread.

"I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent; curiosity, obsession and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism, have brought me to my ideas.” -Albert Einstein

Here's a good article on a similar theme.