(Originally published on Medium.)
Lifted from Austin Kleon’s list of unschoolingposts:
If you’ve never heard of Black Mountain College, Louis Menand’s New Yorker piece “Learn By Painting” is a good start:
What made Black Mountain different from other colleges was that the center of the curriculum was art-making. Students studied pretty much whatever they wanted, but everyone was supposed to take a class in some kind of artistic practice — painting, weaving, sculpture, pottery, poetry, architecture, design, dance, music, photography. The goal was not to produce painters, poets, and architects.It was to produce citizens.
(My highlights in bold.)
Q: How do we bring that openness, cross-pollination, parallel-making into our work?
(I want to run an “art for better public service” course in which people, public servants, go and look at the world / their work / their communities / their service users through an art lens of some kind, and *have the space to* bring back the learnings into their day jobs.)
Photo credit: Austin Kleon’s photo at the Black Mountain College exhibition (Wexner Center)