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These three constituents have had a profound effect on the fourth, the curriculum. The curriculum is shifting position from the centre of education, the core, to the boundary where it is camped between education and the outside world. Some teachers and most administrators have become fixated on the EXIT sign, with the chief question being what do students need to get a job? But the real exit question is how can we turn out students who will fit in with the requirements of society? This cannot be good because it is education for conformity. As George Bernard Shaw said, ‘Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world in which they live. Unreasonable people expect the world to adapt to them. Therefore, all change (all innovation) is due to unreasonable people.’ More and more education is producing students who are reasonable and adaptive. I have no doubt they will find a job. But what kind of job? A job which is tolerable and will pay the rent? Will they want to go to work, or need to go to work? How many of them will confuse exhaustion with fulfilment, labour with occupation, and reason with purpose? Hard work is a means not an end. A means to what? For many people the answer would include wealth and possessions. And colleges, knowingly or not, conspire with this goal when they market education. Challenged with questions of relevance to society, colleges are beginning to cave in to pressure. How do you justify something which is not immediate and practical to a society beset with immediate and practical problems? Outreach programmes are a well-intended solution but disastrous if they take ideas, energy and resources away from the curriculum. There is a doughnut effect as educators empty out the core to feed the boundary. Colleges can be helpful to their communities, but they cannot, should not, serve them. This is a dangerous misconception of education. Colleges are essentially separate from society. They provide time apart for students, an elevation from the mundane. They provide an opportunity to be reflective not reflexive. And they encourage students to immerse themselves in a subject so that it surrounds them. It is this act of surrounding that has been misinterpreted as a wall; and the reaction in many quarters is to break it down. There is no wall, simply a context which has been delimited for academic reasons and which is called a curriculum. This stems, in part, from looking outside education to a world where rapid change has blurred knowledge. Many subjects are now taught as if they are viewed from a fast-moving vehicle. The curriculum is becoming an unlimited context as teachers conceive of knowledge as transferable. A subject is used as a means to other things. For example, art may be taught as a way of understanding politics or social problems. Teachers who do this have ethical and moral intentions but they are not teaching art. Indeed, they compromise the integrity of the subject. The reason for this is, again, partly external. There are always students who study a particular subject but decide not to enter that field when they graduate. In the past, colleges would have drawn the simple conclusion that these students made the wrong choice. Now, the curriculum is being adjusted and becoming more generalised. Herbert Read, the emi

nent British historian, saw this problem emerging 50 years ago when he wrote about educators who teach through a subject, rather than to a subject. The curriculum is the core of education. It is the inner life of a college or university. We admire people who have an inner life, for instance philosophers. Why don’t we acknowledge that education has the same quality? MH Abrams used the metaphor of a lamp that illuminates inner life and a mirror that reflects external reality. The responsibility of education, primarily, is to illuminate not reflect. These conditions are not mutually exclusive but the current between them is one way. A mirror can enhance the light of a lamp. But a lamp cannot increase the reflectiveness of a mirror. ❚

GARETHJONES is professor of foundation studies at Rhode Island School of Design.

Maria Walsh

■ Where future hope lies Much criticism of current trends in art education is made on the basis of how it is becoming increasingly homogeneous (rather than fostering genius?). While counterclaims about ‘widening participation’ by the proponents of teaching and learning are mostly politically correct rhetoric, there are some interesting positive shifts occurring in art education, despite the fact that increasingly high fees make the latter catchword risible and actually encourage the kind of bourgeois romantic individualism traditionally – and still – associated with studying art. The not-so-good old days discriminated against students who did not display the valued artist’s traits of individuality and mastery coupled with the ability to adapt fashionable trends with panache and skill. Students interested in issue-based practices exploring subjectivity and identity often struggled for attention and understanding in an educational environment that was male-dominated and operated according to the unspoken tenets of a high modernist legacy, a discourse foreign to many students’ interests. At ground level, the current art educational environment is much more pluralistic and supportive of a whole range of discourses, which is a cause for celebration, and while some questionable management agendas have been introduced, I think we are going through a transitional phase of positive change. This view means putting to one side the threat of further funding cuts and the fact that most of the things I feel optimistic about are marginal – probably unforeseen – outcomes of the rhetoric of funding and research and its sister body, teaching and learning. At many levels, the recent Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) was divisive and riddled with paranoia and secrecy. However, in spite of this, a stronger sense of belonging to an educational community is currently developing among lecturers involved in research and teaching. While cynics might say that the shared research interest groups that have sprung up in various institutions are simply a ploy to get funding, it is the case that they are

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