28 APRIL 2001, Page 40

Making it up as you go along

Mark Ryan believes a new green paper on culture and creativity is funny, sad and dangerous

On almost any day of the week, Tate Modern is thronged with school children, herded around by harassed-looking teachers, trying their best to keep up a running commentary on Picasso or Rothko. On a recent visit, I saw a teacher try to lecture a class of ten-year-olds on the draughtsmanship of Matisse while the children scribbled away with their pencils and crayons. Tate Modem is more than just an art gallery dedicated to the simple and modest task of showing off its collection. It is above all committed to the production of creative Citizens. The children may not know it, but they are part of a great plan.

Where the culture industry and educational establishment lead, the government follows. A new green paper from the DCMS, Culture and Creativity: The Next Ten Years, contains much familiar rhetoric — accessibility, excellence, cultural diversity and inclusiveness — but now creativity is the key. The green paper is a landmark in the `joined-up thinking' that the Blair government loves so much. State, business, education and culture working together will deliver the imaginative people crucial to economic success, cultural identity and personal wellbeing. There must be something in the water up at the DCMS because every month the visions get more exalted and fantastical.

Like most fantasies of those in power, the culture secretary's plans are funny, sad and dangerous all at the same time. 'Everyone is creative' is the opening line of the green paper. What a nice thing to hear. This is the Forrest Gump school of thought: most of us might look like honest plods on the outside, but underneath it all we are just bursting with brilliant and original insights, musical reflections and painterly visions. Nobody likes to think of himself as ordinary or average, and we all harbour private fantasies of who we could become. Now the state is committed to nourishing those fantasies and massaging our conceit.

A ten-year plan for creativity sounds like another bit of Stalinist folly from the DCMS, but the similarities are rhetorical. Education in the arts was central to the Soviet system, but at least students learned something. You can see the legacy in the way young Russians can still recite Pushkin or even Shakespeare. In Hungary, musical education was compulsory in high school, but what a musical education they got! The conservatories of Russia and Eastern Europe still manage to produce some of the world's finest musicians, despite the collapse of government subsidy. Teachers of art and music in the old Soviet bloc were formidable, even tyrannical. Schooled in the classical tradition, they knew how to make their pupils work. Only through work and dedication would genuine talent and creativity come through.

The idea of creativity fostered by government, in education and in the culture industry, however, is the exact opposite of this. Here, creativity is simply self-expression and mental slackness. In a speech last year, Arts Council chairman Gerry Robinson declared that 80 per cent of a child's mental activity is creative while in adults it's only 1-2 per cent. The only possible interpretation that can be given to this absurd and groundless claim is that creativity is equivalent to ignorance and lack of inhibition.

Go back to those children with Matisse at Tate Modem. Most adults can still make little sense of modern art. Yet ten-yearolds, lacking even the mental apparatus to consider abstract concepts of space and dimension, are expected to make sense of such difficult paintings. It doesn't take too much to work out what the mental process might be in the typical child: 'This big painting in Tate Modern is like that one of mine that Dad stuck on the fridge door. I'm as good as Matisse.' A proper artistic education would probe the child's latent abilities through rigorous training. A 'creative' education leaves him to wallow in his own conceited fantasies. This is why Tate Modern is so popular among teachers of the creative method. A teacher committed to boosting self-esteem and self-expression could persuade a child that he has done a good rendition of a Matisse or a Pollock. Even a child could not be fooled with his efforts in front of a Titian.

As well as ideological prejudice, the dogma of creativity is driven by crude pragmatism. Fewer and fewer teachers coming out of university are capable of teaching anything useful. Many schools have now made the core scientific subjects optional because there are so few teachers who can teach them. Graduates may have degrees in media and communications studies, leisure and tourism, but little knowledge worth imparting. Most teachers of environmental studies, for example, know lots about global warming and sustainable development, but next to nothing about botany, about the real natural world. The less teachers know about anything in particular, the more naturally they are drawn towards subjects which deal in generalities.

• The promotion of cross-disciplinary, vague subjects (anything with the 'studies' appendage), of multimedia courses and learning on the Internet, is a tactic which would once have been familiar to any schoolboy: if you know nothing, talk around the subject, bolt together all the scraps you do know about. These new subjects are perfectly suited to the worst sort of creativity — making it up as you go along. Take the contrast between environmental studies and botany. With botany, either you can identify the flower and its distinctive characteristics or you can't. The student is bound by the discipline of reality. With environmental studies, as long as you observe the general line, you can say pretty much anything you like.

Most repugnant of all, the cult of creativity is coercive. The green paper promises to release the creative and imaginative potential of every individual, especially of children. In reality, it indulges the arbitrary whim of the cultural and educational establishments while forcing young people into subjects which are intellectually worthless and to which they may be entirely unsuited. I learned recently that my nephew has been on the receiving end of creative education. He is 14 and attends school in Oxfordshire. He has a great flair for history, combining that attention to detail with a sensitivity to broader currents. In a sane educational system, his interest would be tested and nurtured. However the school he attends has other ideas. Promoting creativity is a key objective of the school board, so to prevent my nephew getting too immersed in learning and interpreting facts, the school has hatched a cunning little scheme. If he wants to study history, he must also attend six hours of dance classes every fortnight. The instructor gets the gawky teenagers to devise their own dance routines, rather than learning a set of steps, to ensure that they are being truly creative. My nephew has now given up history and chosen instead to do media studies, a subject which he despises, but which at least does not expose him to ridicule in front of his classmates.

Genuine creativity is rare enough, and it is quite right to seek ways of cultivating the imaginative potential of great numbers of people. But there is no short cut through the hard work and dedication which alone can nourish creative powers. The cult of creativity can only indulge the megalomaniac fantasies of those in authority, while inducing a conceited ignorance among its subjects.