20.02.2017
Artists and designers provide an essential contribution to addressing social challenges.
The Dutch political parties VVD (conservative-liberal) and ChristenUnie (Christian-democrat) have stated their intention to reduce by 50% the number of art education students, while slashing the budget for art education by 100 million euros. Without any explanation, and ignoring the recent policy recommendations by Robbert Dijkgraaf and the subsequent sector plan for art education, politicians have once again declared open season on the art sector, and again their first target is art education. Primary and secondary education already provide our youth with far too few opportunities for education in the arts; and now, with this new proposal, the choice of pursuing a career in the arts would be made even more difficult, if not outright impossible. Our children in the Netherlands must now increasingly compete with youth from other countries, while the number of students in higher art education programmes continues to be further reduced. And why?
Are there no employment opportunities for our graduates? Though some art disciplines such as the performing arts and fine arts do not provide access to a traditional labour market, employment perspectives for graduates of art education programmes in fact remain slightly better than for students in the economic domain (0.4%) and even substantially better than for education programmes related to agriculture and the food industry (1.3%).[1] In other words, there are no objective reasons for reducing by half the number of students in art education.
There are no objective reasons for reducing by half the number of students in art education.
Presumably, the VVD and ChristenUnie still believe in the outdated concept of art education as a free ride for ‘weirdos’ who lead a carefree life of sex, drugs and public funding. The reality is that artists and designers are passionate individuals whose talents and commitment play a crucial role in addressing the tremendous challenges facing our society. It is precisely this passionate attitude and broad scope of thinking that allows these individuals to apply unconventional approaches in developing solutions for addressing major social issues. This is why design thinking, for example, has now become integrated as a research and work method within countless other professions.
Our art education programmes are focused on society. Our students participate in partnerships with the municipal government, with social care and healthcare workers in the city’s neighbourhoods, and with major businesses and institutions such as Deloitte, Shell, and the Schiphol international airport. They are able to do so because these businesses and institutions recognise the substantial added value provided by our students. Students of the Willem de Kooning Academy are currently working on addressing a variety of social issues and challenges such as:
- How can we bring vacant shopping spaces in the city back to life by applying both offline and online retail strategies? Our students are doing exactly this, in collaboration with businesses such as De Bijenkorf, MediaMarkt and Donner.
- How can we develop games that help tackle the problem of obesity among children in neighbourhoods such as Rotterdam’s Beverwaard district?
- How can we redirect surplus energy generated through natural purification of contaminated water from the river Maas toward the city’s power supply?
- How can we design smart clothing that informs healthcare workers in realtime of a patient’s current vital signs, which saves time as well as money while also substantially improving the quality of life of the sick and elderly?
These are the kind of issues we are in fact working on. We focus our efforts on students who show real talent and promise. All art education programmes have a very strict admission policy: only one out of every five applicants is accepted! The demand thus far exceeds the current capacity of our education programmes.
The demand thus far exceeds the current capacity of our education programmes.
What would happen if the VVD and the ChristenUnie were able to implement their proposal? Reducing the student population by 50% would mean that many conservatories and art academies would no longer be able to meet the requirement stipulating that institutes with less than 600 students are considered commercially non-viable and should thus be closed. As a result, the only way for institutes such as the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the Design Academy Eindhoven to survive would be to rely on large numbers of non-EU students, meaning that art education institutes would in effect become private schools. Many Dutch cities and towns would lose their art academies: in the north of the country, it would be either Groningen or Leeuwarden, in Brabant it would be either Den Bosch or Breda, while both Enschede and Zwolle would almost certainly lose their art schools. The art education programmes in Maastricht and Tilburg would be reduced to merely a ‘creative’ branch of other education programmes. And this would certainly be the next step: a proliferation of new pseudo-art programmes emerging to fill the gap in addressing the enduring need for art education in the Netherlands.
20.02.2017
[1] Source (in Dutch): Factsheet Kunstonderwijs – Vereniging Hogescholen
