Creative Education, part 1

There are two types learning: objective and subjective.

Objective, 1+1 = 2 learning is the transference of knowledge from teacher to student. You either know the answer or you don’t. It is expansive; the more you learn, the better you are. It is comparative; it is clear when you know more than others.

This wonderful world of science, business and results produces a stable world that fulfills our survival needs to the fullest. It is a mindset of doing and achieving. It is the way of the ego. It is maintained in contrast to something else. It is necessary for a certain time but its main fault is very clear.

In order to succeed someone else must fail.

In sport, all joy is constructed on top of someone else’s misery. This childish level of emotional substance pervades all the way up to presidencies and supreme courts and Harvard and Oxford universities. The prestige is based on someone else being lower.

I am concerned with the artist. Unveiling the original voice within and letting it create with abandon. I mention the above world of objective learning because it has infiltrated the arts. This was no bad thing. Left alone, the arts became indulgent. Being free and original was taken as an intellectual concept.

This meant artists began to ignore form.

You cannot ignore form. You either have a cohesive cosmos or you have a nihilistic chaos, but you ALWAYS have form. However we express ourselves, it is in form. A good artist is someone who tunes into a form that reveals back to ourselves that there is something beyond the form. This is what we consider beauty to be. It speaks to our inner journey.

A less in-tune artist will use the form to reflect upon how other forms are functioning. This becomes political art and touches upon our mind and ideals.

An artist that ignores form produces work that has no skill and usually has to explain with the mind the meaning of the work. People who want to be original by dropping out of all known systems, fail to see that whatever one does has laws of form inherent in it. By not being conscious of this, the artistic endeavour becomes mere indulgence of the self. It lacks depth and understanding of the way of things.

Spirit and meaning move like water through clean channels. If you ignore the fact that water has to move through channels, it will become stagnant. Likewise depth and meaning beyond the mind, that which touches us to the core of our Being that raises our consciousness, that ignites the sleeping caterpillar to burst forth into flight, need a form as a conduit to allow this transference to happen.

Creative education does not ignore form; it simply USES it as a means for the spirit to manifest in the world. The originality, the creative force bursting forth will bring with it its own new grace. Every game we create, be it football, or badminton, produces fresh grace through that unique form. The form simply acts as a backdrop for originality to move.

This is the first point about creative education in order to bring it back out of the hands of objective learning.

It is not an indulgence to do what you like.

The business world reminded artists that they had to be IN the world. The next stage in balancing is letting go again of the heavy hand of result orientation.