February 28, 2010
“Students at other universities think we’re weird,” said the young woman with the long black hair and the ready smile. “They say, ‘Why don’t you just cut that class?’ And when I say, ‘I don’t want to cut it, I want to go to it,’ they look at me like I came from another planet.”
“That’s right,” nodded another girl. “When they find out that we have four-hour classes, they say, ‘Wow, four hours, how can you stand it? That would drive me crazy!’ And they don’t believe it when we say the time really flies by.”
I’m in a studio at NSCAD University, formerly the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. I have a graphic design problem, and Denise Saulnier’s 11 design students are imagining possible solutions. I am so happy to be back at NSCAD that I can hardly describe it.
Twenty years ago I had the good fortune to be NSCAD’s first and only writer in residence. And perhaps what I remember most vividly from that experience is the energy, flair and dedication of the students and faculty, their passion for their work.
The students wanted to be great artists or superb designers. They wanted it desperately, and they worked at it obsessively. The faculty were mature, well-established practitioners, and they were equally obsessive. They were inspiring examples, working long hours, pushing the limits of their disciplines, gaining commissions and showing their work in exotic places like Germany, China and Ottawa. Day and night, the place just hummed. It was the most fierce and fertile learning environment I’ve ever seen.
The rewards of a life in the arts can be pretty meagre — but one of its great benefits is that artists wake up in the morning eager to get started, constantly learning and exploring and innovating. Every day is an adventure. They aren’t necessarily happy, but they know what they’re supposed to be doing with their lives.
“I love writing — it’s both a real agony and a terrific pleasure,” said the great novelist Margaret Laurence. “When I say ‘work,” I only mean writing. Work should be something that you love doing, and that you put everything that you have and more into it, and only that kind of work is really worthy of the name. So when I say ‘work,’ I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.”
Work should be something that you love doing. That’s what the NSCAD students already know. But for too many people in our poor sad culture, “work” is what you have to do, and “play” is what you love to do. That’s what their friends, alas, already know.
If education should be about learning how to do what you love, most of what goes on in our educational system is, to put it kindly, beside the point. Indeed, mass education is really designed to train dutiful workers for traditional industries. Like steelworkers or meat-packers, the children troop off to the factory when the whistle blows, toting their lunch-pails, and dutifully returning when their shift is over.
Non-industrial societies rarely have institutions that look like schools — but their kids get educated anyway. In clan societies, in aboriginal communities, in rural Nova Scotia a century ago, kids learned what they needed to know mostly by hanging out with working adults. Girls learned domestic skills by helping their mothers and grandmothers. Boys learned to be hunters or blacksmiths or navigators by tagging along with men who did that kind of work.
This is not ancient history. When I was 18, I could have become a lawyer without going to university, simply by “articling” in a law office and taking the appropriate examinations. In effect, I would have apprenticed as a lawyer.
This is actually the way that most people learn most efficiently — by acquiring the skills in the course of doing the work, reflecting on the process, trying again, submitting to criticism, internalizing the standards, and practicing, practicing, practicing. That’s what goes on at NSCAD, and it’s exactly what we need in order to thrive in a fast-moving, inventive, knowledge-based economy. NSCAD exemplifies a pedagogy deeply rooted in our past. It’s also the pedagogy of the future.
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