POLITICIANS LIKE TO think of themselves as dynamic visionaries. They have visions about what our country should be like; they have plans for us and lots of slogans and statistics from their favourite think tanks and state-funded charities. Presumably they have to have the visions and plans because the rest of us are too stupid to work out for ourselves what we want. Aren’t we lucky.
They certainly don’t understand creative people or creativity but that doesn’t stop them believing they can legislate both into existence, hence we have Stephen Twigg, Labour’s Shadow Education Secretary (“How on earth will we create the new Steve Jobs?”), staking a claim on creativity as the Golden Grail of education.
In Twigg’s eyes, the current government have got it all wrong, of course, because according to him they want to return to some antiquated system, whereas Labour have their sights set on the future: “The technological advances of today’s digital and creative industries require Britain’s education system to be at the cutting edge,” he says, trying to sound technologically-shiny as if knew what’s going on and had the address of a really good cutting edge. I seem to have heard this kind of talk before.
Now British politics entered woo-woo land some time ago, with its preoccupations with new agey, pseudo-scientific waffle about creativity, “wellbeing” and measurements of national happiness, etc. The formula in the political mind is simple: creativity/wellbeing/happiness = economic success = votes. There’s a certain plodding, uncreative logic to this. False, almost Lewis Carrollian logic, though, because there’s no evidence for any of it. And when Twigg is talking about creativity I’m sure he isn’t thinking about legions of new poets, novelists, painters and sculptors so much as industrial designers, technologists and creators of valuable commodities that will help generate fat tax revenues.
It’s no suprise, then, that he is prolifically fuzzy when he attempts to describe this magic quality, covering as many points as a hedgehog has fleas: it’s about “divergent thinking”, it’s about making young people articulate and confident, it’s a way of thinking, it’s about entrepreneurship, it’s about resilience, it’s about social and economic value, it’s about connecting things, it’s about collaboration, it’s about risk-taking, it’s about being an obtuse college droupout like Steve Jobs – no, that’s not right, surely?
And there’s a stumbling block. Steve Jobs features as a trendy touchstone for Twigg’s white heat of technology gambit, but he’s not really the best example to hold up; after all, he had a less than successful school career and dropped out of college. Most of the important education he had was outside of the system. And many people who knew him would disagree that he was “collaborative” when he was clearly autocratic and something of an egomaniac. His much-publicised encounter with calligraphy was serendipitous, precisely the kind of thing you cannot plan for.
So again we’re back to this illusion politicians have, that they can plan for everything, especially when they have a vision. No doubt Twigg and his crew would like to think they can somehow bring all of the disparate, disconnected elements of such creativity into the bounds of an education system of their design. They think they can somehow stimulate a super-abundance of productivity and at the same time rein it in for their own purposes. They can’t.
What Twigg is proposing is the same old hogwash from a new bucket. It’s a dishonest attempt to cover up the fact that despite decades of “improvement” the British education system is still turning out young people who are in many ways functionally illiterate and innumerate while advocating more of the policies that produced the situation in the first place. And schools have usually made sure pupils have little cultural or artistic knowledge either.
Coming along and saying they need more “creativity” is a joke. Our young people are no more or less creative than they were three or four decades ago – but they are less well educated. Political visions come at a high cost but it’s not the visionaries who end up paying for them.
