Huge structural changes are looming for the education sector. Think of how angry you would be if you were one of the last students to get so deeply into debt before everything changes. - Gordon White
The changes are a coming and the last people that will see
it are the ones with the vested interest in the established ways of doing
things, the very things that are going to be changed. What happened to the infrastructure
of the horse drawn carriage and vehicle market as the internal combustion
engine arrived; they saw it but did they respond to it?
Maybe having a vested interest makes change difficult or
maybe they do not have a way of changing. One thing that appears clear to me as
I get older is how difficult it would be for me to do something different than
being musician. Fortunately being an music gives some flexibility but if I was
somebody trained in a skill for which there is no more demand without an aspect
of being able to step sideways and use my skills somewhere else then it would
be so difficult for me to do something else. Of course for people who made
wheels for carts or tack for horses the arrival of the motor car must have been
a disaster, and in those days there was no such thing as retraining.
I see dangerous parallels with the past with the added necessity
for retraining being part of the landscape of future employment on top of all debt
that a young student will accumulate from university and of course retraining
will not be free either. It looks like a good strategy to keep the wheels of academia
oiled following the principle of medicine that it is more profitable to treat
chronical sick than to cure as you have returning business.
Over the last few weeks I have been pondering the way that
art and music can help people become more flexible in the way that they think
and also looking at the possibility of what you do as an artist to make money.
The principles that people want to be educated and be entertained still holds Many people want to become rock stars in their
dreams particularly when a young. Performance skills being used in the world of
business for public speaking is a good example of how artistic skills can be
turned to a profitable skill.
Extra to the opening quotation is the idea that much of today’s
education can be established virtually for free online and this is an advantage
that we should use to subvert the system but we should also see its failings
that we will end up with many people doing the same thing because the reference
points are the same so again the world of the arts and the ability to re-design
and re-engineer yourself in a sort of Bowie-esque way is something that you
need to work on.
But remember the Nobel laureate’s quote from the 1960s that ‘the
times they are a changing’.
Vic
www.bluescampUK.co.uk
three days of rocking out and learning the tricks of the trade from
professional musicians and teachers with years of experience but hurry spaces
are limited and next year’s allocation is already three-quarter sold-out.
