Are you sitting comfortably?

IN BATTALIONS

If you are in theatre in the UK, and hopefully further afield, you will not have missed the In Battalions campaign. Headed up by Fin Kennedy, the passionate playwright and artistic director of Tamasha theatre company (www.tamasha.org.uk) and educational researcher Helen Campbell-Pickford, In Battalions was a fantastic community activism exercise in countering misguided arguments that supported cutting arts funding especially for new writing development. With fantastic research from Fin and Helen it really created a stir.

This recent article from the Spectator provoked much fevered debate in the In Battalions community. Here's my response to their arguments for blindly cutting arts funding. What do you think? Tweet us or FB. I really think this is part of a wider attack on the humanities in general and it couldn't be more ill timed.

Here's the original article:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/leading-article/9467822/james-mcavoy-is-wrong-the-arts-are-better-off-without-subsidy/

And my take on it:

James Martin, the financial powerhouse behind Oxford University’s Oxford Martin School, a successful business man and prominent futurist recently brought this to culture debate. New research from this Institute leads to a reasonably reliable prediction that by 2030 around 75-80% of what we now consider ‘work’ will be automated. This is backed up by the work of other thought leaders in the tech sector such as Ray Kurzweil, now heading up innovation at Google and the Singularity University. At the same time we have other prominent physicists, roboticists and scientists, in January of this year, publishing an open letter that raises an alarm about the rapidity with which AI advancements are being made.

Whichever way you look at it the future, good or ill, has caught up to us and we need to start thinking about how we are adapting to it.

In the near future who will be the thinkers, artists, writers and other philosophers who help us spend our newly acquired free time? Who educate, inspire and entertain. Who will be the ones working out new ethical codes and social structures in the light of all this tech disruption? Who will those people be if not the developing artists now in need of financial support and the children in schools everywhere crying out for modern, imaginative, playful, technological and empathetic ways of engaging with an already changing world?

It could very well be that the G.C.S.E. structure is out of date and needs overhauling but that is a structural problem of the educational system as a whole not specific to that one subject. Proponents of Michael Gove’s ‘rigorous’ and restrictive educational ‘reforms’ are in danger of seriously hampering our children’s social and cultural development. If they remain fixated on even older models whose sole focus is on producing workers for an economy that may soon be radically different to that of today. They lack the vision to see anything will be different. Perhaps they should have studied drama at school?

Drama as a subject is one of the rare activities that unlock holistic thinking. In drama participants learn about: communication skills, team cohesion, presentation, vocal and other public speaking skills, psychology, history and a tangible feel for it, gender issues, visual and media arts, social cohesion, geography, biography, entrepreneurialism and self-confidence. Most of all they learn empathy. At every lesson they get to practice empathising with others in a wide variety of scenarios.

Empathy, the thing that contributes more than anything else to our sense of common humanity. Empathy, another thing the current British Government and their ministers seem to have a major deficit of. Perhaps if the writer of the Spectator’s piece had done more drama at school he would have had more of it himself – for those of less socially mobile backgrounds. He would also have learnt that drama is useful for many things and not simply for training those who wish to become actors – out of work ones or otherwise.