On education
23 March 2023
“We shall not cease from exploration …”
When I was a lad … there was a general assumption that what you learned, between the ages of six until the early to late twenties, was the foundation of your lifelong knowledge. Upon this you could build a reliable middle class living in the trades or professions for the rest of your life without needing to learn much more. To some extent that remains true for basic knowledge acquired early in life such as arithmetic, writing, and the sciences. It’s also largely valid for timeless manual trades such as mason, plumber, and carpenter. But the content of education for the knowledge based professions is ever more rapidly a perishable item.
One of my former occupations, that of furniture maker, exemplified both. What I learned as a student cabinetmaker in the early 1980s at Edinburgh College of Art about the properties of oak and sycamore, how best to sharpen a saw or chisel, how to cut a dovetail joint for a perfect fit remains as true today as it was then or indeed would have been five hundred years ago. But the content of the related courses on technical drawing, concept presentation, machining, and promotion are now as archaic as if they were also five centuries old.
Now that I’ve ceased working in wood professionally my work takes place in the digital world. Though people no longer think of me as a craftsman, I still am. Not for the obvious reasons of digital modeling being hard, painstaking work but because it is in every sense a traditional craft except for that of tradition. Its tools are computer programs, its materials file formats, and its definitions of elegance and utility are accuracy and efficiency – but reaching a satisfactory result still requires craftsmanship in every classic sense.
No-one asks whether those working in digital media miss creativity because – in this aspect at least – it’s widely recognized that this field is unrivaled and indeed more demanding of a creative approach to problems. For this reason creativity as a professional skill increases in relevance. There are several diverse professions that employ creativity to a similarly high degree. Comedians, gamblers, and magicians each develop and use their training and ability to develop another angle to a situation, to misdirect, and to present a nonintuitive view in a way that furthers their professional goals. These may not be normal archetypes to put forward as ideals for one’s students but the times, they are a-changing.
The magician Teller of Penn and Teller (himself a former teacher) argued a few years ago that an educator has a duty to engage the student and to create a magic that transforms apathy into interest: thus, if the instructor does their job well, an infectious enthusiasm from one to the other takes place. The best teachers, Teller contends, find a way to teach content while keeping students interested. “If you don’t have both astonishment and content, you have either a technical exercise or you have a lecture.” Teller’s educational philosophy is rooted in the philosopher A.N. Whitehead’s “rhythm of education,” a theory that asserts learning happens in three stages: romance, precision, and generalization.
My courses at the University of California are listed as introductions to software but are in fact built around the timeless principles of the subjects in which those programs are used as well as the general principles of similar software performing the same function as that which we specifically study. Thus the course on digital modeling includes modules on light, aesthetics, the properties of materials, mechanisms, and the history of computer modeling. The second, on digital animation, includes sections on storytelling, drama, cinematography, and editing. That on surfacing objects using the software Substance concentrates on backstory, weathering, patterns of use, and erosion. The software used turns out, in the long term, to be the least important part.
Also in the longer term the greatest value of education is learning about learning. The ability to feel joy in greater capabilities and understanding, knowing how to learn fast and enjoyably, the realization that ever more opportunities are available in entirely unexpected fields – this transforms. I seldom end a course without learning more than the students, in many cases about the subject of the course but also about the craft of teaching itself. And through that, inevitably, oneself.
“ … And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
From Little Gidding by T.S. Eliot