Bad Education

The edu­ca­tional turn is a well-documented trend in con­tem­po­rary art as evi­denced by the pro­lif­er­a­tion, in the past 10 years, of artist-run schools and ped­a­gogy projects, such as work­shops, lec­tures, and dis­cus­sion groups. More than just bor­row­ing edu­ca­tional forms, artists are also adopt­ing processes and method­olo­gies that ped­a­gog­i­cal frame­works offer, such as col­lab­o­ra­tive dia­logues, action research, and expe­ri­en­tial learning.

Though artists and edu­ca­tors may over­lap in process, there are dif­fer­ent cri­te­ria, expec­ta­tions, and out­comes for projects that are invested in the world of art, and projects that are invested in the world of edu­ca­tion. Is it pos­si­ble that a good art­work amounts to a bad edu­ca­tion? What are the expec­ta­tions of each field, whose cri­te­ria will we use to eval­u­ate these projects, and where is there convergence?

Helen Reed met Pablo Helguera at the MoMA Staff Café, in New York to chat about some of the cur­rent inter­sec­tions between art and edu­ca­tion. Helguera has worked between these fields for over 20 years. He observes, in his pub­li­ca­tion Edu­ca­tion For Socially Engaged Art that “edu­ca­tion today is fueled by pro­gres­sive ideas, rang­ing from crit­i­cal ped­a­gogy and inquiry based learn­ing to the explo­ration of cre­ativ­ity in early child­hood. For this rea­son it is impor­tant to under­stand the exist­ing struc­tures of edu­ca­tion and to learn how to inno­vate within them. To offer a cri­tique, for exam­ple, the old-fashioned board­ing school sys­tem of mem­o­riza­tion today would be equiv­a­lent, in the art world, to mount­ing a fierce attack on a nineteenth-century art move­ment.”[i] With this acknowl­edge­ment in mind – of the blind spots between dis­ci­plines – we dis­cussed the rela­tion­ship between pre­sen­ta­tion and mak­ing, learn­ing out­comes ver­sus abstract edu­ca­tion, and how to be rev­o­lu­tion­ary and at the same time institutional.

Helen Reed: As a place to start, I want to refer to the intro­duc­tion of Edu­ca­tion for Socially Engaged Art. You men­tioned that you came to art and edu­ca­tion simul­ta­ne­ously, and that con­se­quently you noticed many sim­i­lar­i­ties between the two fields. Can you describe the kinds of crossovers that you noticed, and how these par­al­lels influ­enced your practice?

Pablo Helguera: I was at the School of the Art Insti­tute of Chicago, which hap­pens to be a school and a museum. It’s an insti­tu­tion that is con­nected by a bridge, between the school and the museum. Imme­di­ately, I was exposed to a rela­tion­ship with art that was between pre­sen­ta­tion and mak­ing. I was broke as a stu­dent and I started work­ing at the museum, first as part of a paid intern­ship. I would cross the bridge all the time, between one place and the other. I would be in my dirty paint­ing clothes in the class­room then I would get very preppy to go into the other envi­ron­ment. I did not think any­thing about being in the edu­ca­tion depart­ment, but I just hap­pened to grav­i­tate there because I was bilin­gual and because they needed peo­ple for out­reach, etc. I made sense there. So it’s not some­thing that I par­tic­u­larly chose.

But the moment I started to real­ize that teach­ing is very much con­nected to per­form­ing then I started notic­ing points at which things started to con­nect. When I grad­u­ated from school I was already doing per­for­ma­tive lec­tures and the like. I started becom­ing inter­ested in what became known as Insti­tu­tional Cri­tique, artists who were appro­pri­at­ing the modes of dis­play within muse­ums. So I was doing a lot of that in the early 90s. I became very inter­ested in fic­tion and the whole idea that you, as an artist, can con­struct this envi­ron­ment that really ques­tions the limit of what you con­sider real­ity. Muse­ums become par­tic­u­larly attrac­tive when you are inter­ested in fic­tion. That is what a lot of Insti­tu­tional Cri­tique artists do, mod­i­fy­ing cer­tain aspects of the inte­rior of the space, which all of a sud­den make you real­ize that there is some­thing else going on. In doing so, you are alter­ing the pro­to­cols, the reg­u­lar expec­ta­tions. So I started doing that, but I still didn’t see a direct con­nec­tion to edu­ca­tion for a while. But even­tu­ally I real­ized that the best thing I can do is to bring what I’m learn­ing from the envi­ron­ment of the insti­tu­tion into my own work. And I started cre­at­ing fic­tional muse­ums, fic­tional artists, and those fic­tional artists started hav­ing biogra­phies and bod­ies of work and inter­pre­tive mate­ri­als. I was much more inter­ested in the periph­eral com­po­nents of an art­work than the art work itself.

I remem­ber once, in Port­land, I did a piece at a Uni­ver­sity that was called Mock Tur­tle. There was a whole exhi­bi­tion around an object that nobody could see, but there were hun­dreds of labels and inter­pre­tive mate­ri­als around this object. Sup­pos­edly it’s a tur­tle that you can see inside a box, but you can’t really see it. It’s this idea of how the object is basi­cally unnec­es­sary; it’s really more the sto­ries around the object and how the con­tex­tual frame­work, the inter­pre­tive frame­work of the object is what really mat­ters in the end, and that this is what really influ­ences our per­cep­tion of it.

By that time, Rela­tional Aes­thet­ics was in vogue. Artists were out there doing projects that were based on cre­at­ing inter­sub­jec­tive rela­tion­ships. But I became sus­pi­cious of the qual­ity of those exchanges. I remem­ber I was work­ing at the Guggen­heim, see­ing artists like Rirkrit Tira­vanija pre­sent­ing projects. And I remem­ber, for exam­ple, once, Rirkrit say­ing he wanted to do a project that used a gallery for children’s activ­i­ties. I remem­ber the cura­tor call­ing us in the edu­ca­tion depart­ment and being like “Quick, quick we have to come up with kids and bring them to the gallery to do activ­i­ties with them.” Noth­ing against Rirkrit, but I felt that the whole project was so hap­haz­ard and so arti­fi­cial. Because really, we are pre­tend­ing that we are doing edu­ca­tion here, that we were cre­at­ing a great expe­ri­ence for these kids. I have no idea what ended up hap­pen­ing with the project. But those were the kind of expe­ri­ences that made me sud­denly real­ize: isn’t it inter­est­ing that I’m here, a mere edu­ca­tor, like many other edu­ca­tors who actu­ally know very well how to pro­duce these expe­ri­ences, that’s our exper­tise; and yet we have absolutely no power over this cer­tain sit­u­a­tion where peo­ple, who know absolutely noth­ing about these audi­ences, decide they want to do an edu­ca­tional expe­ri­ence for them in the guise of an art­work, which has to hap­pen promptly and effi­ciently. And the action will likely be cov­ered by art mag­a­zines; by peo­ple who know absolutely noth­ing about these audi­ences, and then they will most likely be con­vinced that some­thing really great hap­pened. While those, who sup­pos­edly the activ­ity was cre­ated for, most likely were hur­ried into a sit­u­a­tion self-proclaimed as edu­ca­tional and per­haps manip­u­lated into being pho­tographed as part of the documentation.

This is a very com­mon ten­dency of muse­ums that dates back to the 80s when insti­tu­tions were try­ing to do mul­ti­cul­tural inclu­sion in gal­leries. So you would bring a bunch of kids from the low income neigh­bor­hoods, give them a T-shirt from the museum and stand them in front of the steps of the museum, and then show the photo to the fun­ders. What­ever they do there, what­ever expe­ri­ence they have there doesn’t really mat­ter, what really mat­ters is that those kids of color are in front of the gates of the museum. Those are the kind of expe­ri­ences that made me real­ize that I don’t want to make that kind of “rela­tional” art. I don’t want to make art that’s about say­ing that I did some­thing. I want to make art that does some­thing. I don’t always care whether peo­ple under­stand or not that I am doing it, but I want to know for my own sake that what I did had that impulse.

Global Education

Belize Education Statistics
In Belize only two of five high school age children are enrolled in secondary school.(Ministry of Education,Belize)

Only 40 percent of children who graduate from primary school take admission to secondary school.(Ministry of Education, Belize)

Many children drop out of school at age 14.( Belize Government Study)

College admission is low due to low income and lack of scholarship funding.(Ministry of Education, Belize)

Global Education Facts

Based on enrollment data, about 72 million children of primary school age in the developing world were not in school in 2005; 57 per cent of them were girls. And these are regarded as optimistic numbers.(Millennium Development Goals Report 2007)

Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names.(The State of the World’s Children, 1999, UNICEF)

Less than one per cent of what the world spent every year on weapons was needed to put every child into school by the year 2000 and yet it didn’t happen.(State of the World, Issue 287 – Feb 1997, New Internationalist)

Children out of education worldwide
121 million

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”.

Nelson Mandela

Important education in Islam.

utilizing a society where religion and knowledge in general and science in explicitdon't go hand in hand, it looksneeded to briefly describe the positioning of islam vis-à-vis knowledge, islam, in theory too as in apply, has continually promoted knowledge. distinctive mark of kinsmenwithin the an­gels is knowledge :


and allah taught adam all the names…” ( 2 :31 )



the very first verses on your quran began when using the word :
browse. browsewithin the whole name of thy lord who created ; he created the human being from blood clot. browsewithin the whole name of thy lord who taught via the pen : he taught the human being what he failed tounderstand. ( ninety six : 1-5 ).
the quran says.
are those who have knowledge corresponding to those who don't have knowledge ? !”( 39 :9 ).

the prophet of islam ( peace be upon him and his progeny ) has conjointly empha­sized the importance of seeking knowl­edge in alternative ways :

( a ) time : seek knowledge direct from cradle in the grave.
( b ) place : seek knowledge even whenit'sway as china.
( c ) gender : seeking of knowledge may be a duty of each and every muslim
( d ) supply : wisdom will be the lost prop­erty on your believer, he should bring iteven when finds it within the whole mouth of the mushrik.


the prophet failed tono more than preach about importance of knowledge, he conjointly gave examples of promoting knowledge. within the wholeto start with battle involving the muslims and unbelievers or mecca, known clearly as the war of badr, the muslims gain victory and caught seventy kuffars as prisoners of war. one in each of the factors of releasing the pows devised via the prophet was that those who were literate among the pris­oners might go free if these teach ten mus­lim youngsters how to learn to read and write.

TOP 10 Univesities in The World..

1. Harvard University, United States
2. University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
4. Yale University, United States
5. The University of Melbourne, Australia

6. New York University (NYU), United States
7. London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), United Kingdom
8. Columbia University, United States
9. Stanford University, United States
10. The University of Sydney, Australia

TOP 10 Colleges & Universities in Indonesia

1 Universitas Gadjah Mada (Yogyakarta)

2 Institut Teknologi Bandung (Bandung)

3 Universitas Indonesia (Depok)

4 Universitas Brawijaya (Malang)

5 Universitas Gunadarma (Depok)

6 Institut Pertanian Bogor (Bogor)

7 Universitas Diponegoro (Semarang)

8 Universitas Sebelas Maret (Surakarta)

9 Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia (Bandung)

10 Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (Surabaya)

Education?

the wealth of knowledge acquired by a private after studying explicit subject matters or experiencing life lessons that offer an understanding of one thing. education needs instruction of a sort from a private or composed literature. the foremost common methods of education result from years of schooling that incorporates studies the mostsort of subjects. jamie knew the importance relevant to an education, therefore she selectedout tohead to a four-year university after graduating from your childhood.

Education for Children

education could be a fundamental human right and very importantto firmly achieving economic growth, increasing income, and sustaining the ideal society. education is vital in serving toto further improve lives, break the cycle of poverty and be certain that all individuals, notablyladies have management over their destiny.

despite international progress, 75 million primary school-aged youngsters are still away fromfaculty – over half whom are girls ( supply : efa international monitoring report 2008 ).

there may beseveral reasons youngstersdon't go to firmlyfaculty or keeptillthese are done. thesecould haveto firmly walk an extended distance to firmly get to firmlyfaculty, don't have any food to firmly eat at home, there's hardly any teacher or they usually haveto firmlymaintain a younger brother or sister.

plan is committed to firmly ensuring that girls and boys are able to realize their full potential. we think thatyoungsterscan flourish if these are able to go faculty, keep there tilltheseendand remember the basic skills of literacy, mathematics, life skills and important thinking because we are part of a supportive setting. we help them to carry out this by supporting education initiatives. we work in communities across the globe regarding the long term, obtainingto learn their desiresthuswe are able tohigher help them. this long term assistance conjointlysuggests that we are preparedto firmly respond each time a humanitarian crisis seems.

plan has 3 priority areas where we focus our attention and education resources.

improving admission to education
improving quality of education
improving governance and management of education

over yesteryear5 years, plan has invested over $180 million in primary education in additional than 40 countries throughout asia, africa, latin america and of course the caribbean.


what does your support give ?

plan invests a lot of in basic education than in some other program area. your support to firmly our education programs provides youngsters, teachers, their families or caregivers and communities along with the infrastructure, coaching, tools, services and support thesewould like for a higher education. along with your support we offers :

quality daycare centers and elementary schools ;
classroom equipment and furniture ;
teaching and learning materials, together with current textbooks, maps, globes, teaching manuals, writing provides, chalkboards, etc. ;
playgrounds and different recreational areas for youngsters ;
coaching for teachers, principals, and kid care providers ;
coaching of parent-teacher associations and faculty management committees.