So here we are, in the winter of our discontent. Christmas it may be, but the chill we feel is not of the month, it’s existential. These are cold hard times. The wolves are at the door. The fire is but an ember. We pull the rug around us and hope…that the darkest hour is just before dawn, that the light we see is the end of the tunnel and not a coming train...

And yet and yet… The sun has reached its lowest and the fairy lights are on. We’ll do our best. It’s a good time to think and to plan. In that spirit…
The educator Ken Robinson tells a story about Christmas. His four year old son once took part in a nativity play. Three boys played the three wise kings. They came on stage with their tea towel headgear bearing gifts. For no particular reason they got a little mixed up. The first kid said ‘I bring you gold’. The second said ‘I bring you myrrh’. The third said “Frank sent this”…
Robinson interprets it as follows – children will take a chance – “if they don’t know, they’ll have a go”… “they’re not afraid to be wrong”.
You can watch this monologue here:
It’s amusing and enlightening. It’s also very relevant to where we (apparently) want to go to get ourselves out of the current difficulties and into a land of milk and honey. At the first Farmleigh get together, everyone came away talking about the creative industries and how arts and culture would provide the gas to drive the motor of recovery. Or words to that effect.
Fair’s fair, the possibilities of the creative industries are real, as a recent Arts Council report has shown. But to be honest, some of the noise that followed Farmleigh was a case of people staking out or enlarging their already well-farmed patch. The big issue now is whether we can move beyond what exists to a new level. That will demand new people and new ideas.
It will also require new thinking. As Ken Robinson comments: if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original…and by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.
His view is that this is how companies are run now – mistakes are stigmatised – and how our education systems operate, where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. You can see it everywhere, nowhere better, perhaps, than in the league tables of education results published by the Irish Times.
According to Robinson every education system on earth has the same hierarchy, with mathematics and languages at the top, then the humanities and the arts at the bottom. At a certain point, “we educate from the waist up, then we focus on their heads.”
The best way to evaluate education is to look at who benefits, who gets the rewards and for what. I’ll tell you what: it isn’t the winners in the Leaving Certificate who get the prizes for creativity. A couple of years back a question was posed in the Leaving Cert Maths paper that was unexpected. Pandemonium ensued. There was outrage. The question demanded that candidates think! What was going on?!?
Is it any wonder that a lot of people abandon ship in first year of higher education? That there are mental health problems? That our much-vaunted creativity operates in such narrow channels and such rarefied air?
It’s far too easy to point the finger of blame at schools and teachers. They contribute, for sure. But a society reproduces itself through its education system. No excuses please, everyone’s to blame. It goes far beyond education. Now, thanks to the madness of bankers and the blunders of past politicians, we have a culture in which any error is seized on and its perpetrator humiliated…
So how are we supposed to have original thoughts? To be creative?
Of course, creativity isn’t just about giving established and well-connected arty people a slice of the pie, worthy though that might seem to them. At the level of economic policy it’s about a whole lot more. It’s about permeating our society, economy and culture with original thinking that has, or that adds, value. In the same way as we need an enterprising culture, we need a creative economy and society.
One could speculate about where religion fits in all of this. It’s true that much medieval art drew from that well – but overall, and especially in the 21st century, the dogma and certainty of many faiths is the antithesis of creativity and the bane of original thought. Why else would the Taliban forbid music and destroy sculptures? So how can a faith-based education system maintain and promote creativity?
Which returns us to the season we’re in. Midwinter. The feast of Saturnalia. The darkest hour. Six, seven thousand years ago, our ancestors watched as the sun lowered in the sky until it reached the point where it could go no lower and would start to rise. They inscribed the stones and daubed the walls. We don’t know what they sang but sing they most certainly did. And dance.
From what we now know of them, these activities were intertwined with astronomy and engineering, new knowledge shaping a new world. We’re in a similar place now, in the epicentre of a revolution of technology and demography that is both thrilling and frightening. All is changing.
Children will be the focus of much over the coming weeks. That’s good. But it’s also well past time to listen to them, to marvel at their originality, curiosity and ingenuity, and to celebrate their preparedness to have a go. If we’re to deliver on the grand vision of a creative economy, we’d be well advised to become more like children ourselves.
Let that start at Christmas. Or whatever you want to call it!
Ho Ho Ho!