In 1980 I was a teacher of art in a high school. For all of the lip service paid to subject equality, art and in fact all of the arts, were essentially a dumping ground for all of those students unable to find their niche in maths, science and English – but that’s another story. In response to the plethora of official documents released that year by the education department and which were aimed at providing direction for a new decade, I was part of endless staff meetings where the agenda was to produce a relevant school philosophy that justified the curriculum content in terms of student outcomes. There was a built-in assumption that all students would want to progress to further education, preferably at university campuses. But beneath that exalted layer of student lay several others where nothing of the kind would ever be happening. The school system had no idea what to do with them and even at this early stage of the 80s the belief was that the school wasn’t meeting the needs of students or setting them up for the future. It was pretty much a hit and miss process and attempts to find ground between Maths, Science and English wherein the arts and the so-called hidden curriculum of values-driven education might fit, occupied education minds.
While art as a profession certainly wasn’t taken seriously, there was the belief that any student need train only once and could be in the same job with yearly promotion for life. The threat of automation removing jobs and making workers redundant was scoffed at as was my contribution to the afforementioned staff meetings. It would only be a while before Mitsubishi, Holden and other car makers would automate and eventually give up manufacturing completely. I suggested that it wouldn’t be long before an entire class of unemployed or unemployable people would need to make positive use of their ever-increasing leisure time because that was the direction in which we were heading. Prescient? Possibly.
Shift rapidly in time to the 21st century and computer algorithms can and will take over many if not all professions including manufacturing, teaching, medical diagnosis, stock market predictions and driving. Even five years ago the thought of a driverless car was fiction and the very idea of computers teaching and understanding the individual emotional needs of students an impossibility.
My suggestion of a clause in the school philosophical document regarding catering for increased ‘leisure’ time was met with derisive laughter and not included. My further suggestion that the visual arts would play a major role and needed to be taken more seriously had no impact at all. However, by the end of the decade art teachers and art departments were being discarded and downsized and in the last year that I taught art some twenty-five art teachers of my acquaintance were put on the ‘roundabout’ of week by week or term by term appointments where actual art teaching was replaced with substitute or relief work in any other subject.
This is not a diatribe about the unfair treatment of art teachers or about the current push to implement creativity actively into all areas of the curriculum in the belief that we may need such creativity if humanity is to survive. In following the line of thought presented in HOMO DEUS by Noah Harari [Man is God] the very idea of not only relevant work, but of the idea of a job itself, may be becoming an antiquated idea. AI and computer-driven industry will not need humanity at all. One illustration mentioned in HOMO DEUS that stuck with me was that an AI medical diagnostic program can be 95% accurate in terms of diagnosis and treatment whereas a human doctor gets it right only 55% of the time. What that says about the future of the medical profession is anybody’s guess.
However, to return to the role to be played by art in a future society. Not only is my prediction an increasing reality but art practice has become the go-to solution for so many in the world seeking either a relevant creative outlet or a means of escape from the reality of 21st century living. While the uptake of students involved in the visual arts in secondary schools is diminishing by the year after the initial compulsory taster years, the number of people attaching themselves to online courses is staggering. Governments boast about lowered unemployment levels believing that not only are schools providing meaningful education, but that people are actually in meaningful work. If that was the case then the numbers looking for creative outlets beyond school would make no sense.
That whole idea of meaningful work can be a misnomer. In ancient times the populace seems to have willingly given itself to indentured labour to build impressive monuments and even today, large numbers are involved in civic projects such as road building, although I doubt there is the level of the civic pride previously seen in building a temple to a much-loved god. The best that you can say is that it pays the bills, just. When Mubarek, the former leader, was in power in Egypt, he boasted that there was no unemployment in Cairo. He had guards in uniform stationed at every road junction, carrying a rifle [without ammunition], but armed with a brush and pan to sweep sand off the pavements. All were gainfully employed until the Arab Spring asserted the rights of the people. He didn’t see any of it coming. There were no creative outlets other than civil action.
We could talk about the arts, and particularly the visual arts, as the cornerstone of civilisations. The fact that few people were creatively involved other than as labourers in building the pyramids and Stonehenge, voluntary or otherwise in the service of either a deity or an imagined state, was a fact of life. One person dreamed up a monument and everyone else got to build it. We are no longer in that position. Religion, the state, nationalism and even governments, however elected, are of increasing irrelevance. What remains is a population being asked to retrain for jobs on an annual basis, jobs that may vanish in the blink of an eye. As with Mubarek, that scenario is doomed to failure. People may well go through the annual retrain and search a few times – when they are still young enough and optimistic enough – but it won’t last.
My premise of half a century ago that quality of life, a creative life, needs to be a determining factor of education still holds true but we are no closer now than when I foolishly expounded the idea at a staff meeting. If Noah Harari is right in HOMO DEUS, then we are on the verge of needing a plan B and the visual arts may well be just that. To provide relevance and quality of life in the face of mass unemployability would seem to be self-evident. A particularly telling episode of Black Mirror [ a TV show about a dystopian future], spelt out the opposite. The unemployable rode exercise bikes, all day every day, to generate socially responsible electricity and the possibility of accumulating enough points to appear on a TV game show as celebrities. It seems farfetched. Perhaps not.
The time to consider a creative future based upon the visual arts is now. Those subscribing to online courses are probably ahead of the game and the billions waiting in the wings to appear on a future employment stage may need something to while away the hours. The alternative is to wait for the inevitable surge in civic restlessness that saw Mubarek consigned to failure and an unemployed, brownshirt army rise under Hitler. The lesser version of art as a panacea for bored people need not be the reality. The greater version sees creativity as the core of being.