Strange objects amass in the Camberwell Collection. A single set of Jacobsen coffee spoons. A textile horse from Nepal. Three terracotta bells painted to resemble faces with open mouths. Vases, endless vases. A Lucie Rie tea set, next to a set of acrobat toys. A cigarette case in pale blue. Eclecticism reigns—, though eclecticism alone is not the collection’s organising principle. What groups these peculiar and beautiful objects together is their educational purpose; their ability to teach their audience what it means to have a ‘good sense of design’.
First assembled in 1951, the Camberwell Collection brings together over 6000 objects used as part of what was known as the Circulating Design Scheme: a handling collection to be loaned to London secondary schools in order that students might use these ‘well-designed objects’ to learn the principles of design. Within the extensive collection, schools were able to borrow carefully curated exhibits, sent to schools in purpose-built showcases, opening almost as if doors to a museum in miniature. The showcases contained displays with titles such as ‘Looking at Glass’, ‘Pottery by Hand and Machine’, ‘Design for Tableware’, and ‘Scandinavia: Industrial Art from Four Countries’—displays with a clear emphasis on the harmony that might be struck between industry and art. Craft was an important feature; almost all the displays referred to specialised processes: joining metals, throwing pots, blowing glass. The didactic element of the Scheme went beyond crafting well-designed objects. The Scheme aimed towards a much broader aesthetic education, one that spoke to art historian and educationalist Herbert Read’s insistence that ‘there must be an instinctive realization of the fact that beauty and utility, each in its highest degree, cannot be conceived separately’. This was to be an education in perceiving beauty and in taste: an education not only in design, but also in the appreciation of aesthetic form itself.
Set up by the Council of Industrial Design and the London County Council, and later managed by the Inner London Education Authority, the aesthetic impulse behind the Scheme emerged in a moment of bursting optimism surrounding the possibilities of art education—an optimism of radical reform mirrored in every other area of society. The Design Scheme, and other pockets of radical aesthetic experimentation, did not emerge wholly formed in the postwar era but instead built upon a preexisting campaign on the left for educational reform on aesthetic grounds. In 1932, for instance, a report by the Macdonald Government’s Gorell Committee noted the ‘importance of giving a right direction to the taste of boys and girls while they are still at school’, and recommended ‘the understanding and enjoyment of beautiful things’ become ‘an essential part of the day-to-day life of the school’. The Council of Industrial Design was established in direct response to the report. It was initially placed under the leadership of Frank Pick, a pioneer of design also responsible for establishing the design principles for the London Passenger Transport Board (later Transport for London), and who commissioned artists such as Enid Marx and Paul Nash to design textiles and moquettes for the London Underground. Like Pick, the Council were invested in public design as a democratising force; one Design Scheme catalogue announced, ‘Design is not just something for those who can draw, anyone can get pleasure from the shape of a wooden desk or the satisfying curve of a handle’. But getting pleasure from the shape of a wooden desk was also a faculty of judgement that could be practised and sharpened. The view of the Council was that this very practice of judgement—what we might also call a cultivation of taste—required an educational system aimed towards developing aesthetic sensibility. Or, as a columnist in the Evening News in 1937 wrote: ‘the advancement of taste should accompany the advancement of learning’.
The implication here is that aesthetic education is a necessary part of pedagogy: schools should not restrict themselves to training students only in cognition and reason. But there exists a distinct political implication: that aesthetic education is a particularly mobile democratising force, one that both equalises (there are no prerequisites for getting pleasure from a well-shaped cup), and individualises (I will experience the pleasure of the cup differently from you): Read describes this as a democracy founded on ‘individuality, variety, and organic differentiation’. This capacity of an aesthetic encounter to work at once both on the individual and mass level has long been attractive to socialists concerned with the alienating effects of capitalist organisations of labour. No thinker expresses this more aptly than John Ruskin, who in his Lectures on Art (1870) remarked that
great obscurity has been brought upon the truth in this matter by the want of integrity and simplicity in our modern life. I mean integrity in the Latin sense, wholeness. Everything is broken up, and mingled in confusion, both in our habits and thoughts; besides being in great part imitative: so that you not only cannot tell what a man is, but sometimes you cannot tell whether he is, at all!—,
a view he expresses throughout his work, such as in his essay on ‘The Nature of Gothic’ (1853):
We have studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men.
Ruskin suggests that an experience of art is able creatively to reconstruct a sense of self from industrial labour’s shattering of individuality. Ruskin takes on the language of Friedrich Schiller, who in the ur-text of aesthetic education, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794) writes that ‘we see not only individual subjects, but whole classes of men, uphold their capacities only in part, while the rest of their faculties scarcely show a germ of activity, as in the case of the stunted growth of plants’. Only, in Ruskin’s hands does Schiller’s aesthetic philosophy become material for a pointed socio-economic critique. Ruskin doesn’t shy away from naming industrialised labour and capitalist production as the cause of man’s fragmentation: ‘we manufacture everything except men’, he states. Schiller’s claim that aesthetic experience holds the potential to realise man in his fullness is keenly felt in Ruskin’s aesthetics; but Ruskin’s aesthetic subject is simultaneously a political one. Observation, perception, and attention to beauty have the capacity to bring about a newly humanised subject—which, for Ruskin, along with a long succession of socialist thinkers, places them in direct opposition to the productive and consumptive forces of industrialisation and their alienating effects.
It is worth bearing in mind that Ruskin, unlike Schiller, delivered many of his ideas on aesthetic education through lectures, and remained committed to teaching throughout his life. For Schiller aesthetic encounters alone could lead their subjects into their newly enlivened lives; for Ruskin, however, education was not be taken metaphorically. There is a literalness at work here; aesthetic education really does mean learning to draw, which in turn opens onto lessons in attentiveness and sensitivity to the world’s intricate pleasures. By understanding aesthetic education as involving both the direct transformation of the sensuous materials of the world and the experience of encountering a beautiful object, Ruskin’s influence is made palpable in the Design Scheme, as well as in a vast range of contemporaneous local educational reform efforts committed to using aesthetic education as a practical basis for teaching in schools. Herbert Read describes the demand for art education neither as a demand for more art lessons, nor for a higher proportion of the curriculum to be given over to so-called ‘creative’ subjects or even as an abstract notion of the expansion of consciousness in an aesthetic encounter. ‘We demand’, he instead wrote, ‘a method of education that is formally and fundamentally aesthetic’.
Utopian notes resound. A practical implementation of aesthetic education demanded not just amendments reforms to the education system but a complete overhaul of pedagogy. What is remarkable about this utopian vision is that it was, for a time, realised. Read worked closely with Alec Clegg, a revolutionary educationalist who between 1945 and 1974 served as the Chief Education Officer for the West Riding of Yorkshire, and was also a member of the Council of Industrial Design. Deeply influenced by Read, and motivated by his own philosophy of education, Clegg transformed the West Riding’s approach to education, introducing what he described as ‘a humanising curriculum’. Clegg’s educational planning was the answer to Read’s demand: aesthetic sensibility became the framework through which all other aspects of education were organised. Clegg often quoted a poem found on a sampler in his aunt’s house:
If thou of fortune be bereft
And of this earthly store hath left
Two loaves, sell one, and with the dole,
Buy hyacinths to feed the soul.
Loaves and hyacinths were Clegg’s guiding metaphors; but hyacinths in particular proved an influential image. Clegg’s conception of education was one where ‘what you are is more important than what you know’: an education aimed towards giving the student ‘a way of living’. Such a way of life, and of self-expression, could be felt across all subjects, not only those traditionally ‘creative’ ones, since all aspects of life could awaken a creative and originating power in the students’ minds. Education, Clegg wrote, ought not to concern itself with ‘pot-filling’, or the cramming of information, but rather with ‘fire-lighting’, with igniting the desire to take pleasure in the world, becoming alive to the poetic force of imagination. ‘The desire to read, the love of music, the development of imagination and creative power and the inculcation of really high standards of aesthetic enjoyment’, he writes, ‘are things that matter supremely in the field of education’.
In the case of the Design Scheme and the West Riding educational reform, it was local government that proved to be the vehicle through which aesthetic education’s utopian vision could be brought into practice. Clegg’s philosophy of aesthetic education was directly translated into radical educational reform; his belief, for instance, that ‘we can test a child’s ability to read, but not his desire to do so; we can test his ability to play an instrument, but not his love of music; we can form a numerical assessment of his draughtsmanship and precision, but not of his growth in creative power and imagination’ resulted in major shifts in the role of exams in schools, including policies that allowed teachers’ judgement to replace examination in some cases. Curriculum reform was also ratified at the local government level, introducing an aesthetic method of education across all schools in the West Riding. Clegg rejected the idea of a curriculum as a syllabus of compulsory subjects; instead he understood the curriculum as a model for ‘creating an environment’ in which students would ‘have skills to live by’ and, also, ‘learn how to live’. Clegg supported schools in the West Riding to take on this new curriculum and to reorganise their schools according to fundamental aesthetic principles.
Education, more than any other left-wing priority, tends towards a localised radicalism. Utopian ideas are often prefigured in brief, luminous moments. Lesbian separatism, for example, experienced a wave of popularity in the late 1960s in which it functioned as a legitimate way of organising life. But separatist movements were always precisely that: separate. Not only did they consciously organise life outside dominant institutions, but crucially they structured life around desire, not place. Utopian movements in education, in contrast, repeatedly prefigured utopia within already-existing local institutions. Clegg writes of how he was inspired to follow in the footsteps similar local reform then occurring throughout the UK, especially the changes in comprehensive education and the introduction of three-tier education in Birmingham and Worcestershire, where Clegg had begun his career. Radical pedagogues across the world seem more likely to be embedded at the local level then anywhere higher up; one of the most influential of such philosophers, Paulo Freire, is an apt example: like Clegg, he worked as the Director of the Department of Education and Culture at the state level (in Pernambuco, from 1946), and considered his educational philosophy to be intimately related to localised work, like in his 1962 project to improve literacy among sugarcane harvesters in Recife.
Unlike the high-modernist projects of the 20th century, education doesn’t necessarily rely on large-scale infrastructure to be effective. It is difficult to imagine a radical restructure of energy production at a local level: nationalisation exists uneasily with local autonomy. But aesthetic education, with its emphasis on close, sustained, and generative pedagogical relationships, is well-suited to being introduced through municipal reform or revolution. What makes the local focus of Clegg’s educational policy particularly striking is that it coincided with the introduction and implementation of the 1944 Education Act, which brought schools under much closer state supervision. The Act ensured the provision of free secondary education for all pupils even as it took away much of the autonomy of local authorities. Although both the 1944 Act and the ensuing local educational reforms broadly shared the principles of social democratic reform, it was at a local level that education could be radically restructured and come to embody the very experimental freedom so central to the aesthetic experience it valued so highly. The mid-century utopianism of aesthetic education is not reducible to the strength of post-war liberalism; through local government, it both advanced the social democratic aims of the state, and realised a radicalism pointed beyond the national government’s political limits.
It is tempting to view the optimism of the mid-century as a distant, irretrievable dream. The welfare state has already been largely privatized, and flats at the Barbican sell for millions of pounds. Margaret Thatcher’s 1988 Education Reform Act reversed many of the changes introduced in the years that preceded her—starting, unsurprisingly, with the introduction of grant-maintained schools, giving schools the opportunity to opt-out of local control and receive funding directly from national government. 6000 beautifully designed objects sit unused in the Camberwell Collection: one of Thatcher’s most symbolic acts was the dissolution of the Inner London Education Authority, the only local authority explicitly named in the 1988 Act. It is so obvious as to be banal to point out that Starmer’s government offers little hope of a return to bold pedagogic vision. But revisiting the post-war utopianism of the left ought to remind us of the radical possibility of localised experiments in education. Indeed, being able to respond both sensuously and sensitively is the very aim of an education structured on aesthetic principles. Despite the historical distance between our present moment and that of the mid-twentieth century, we could do a lot worse than to pay close, aesthetic attention to the way in which our own histories show up in the material world. This is, of course, one of the fundamental principles of any aesthetic education: to attend to the particular. This requirement to deal in particularity over universality is precisely the privilege of local government. Political imagination, then, need not be a generalising force; it too might take on a poetic quality. If mid-century educational policy offers anything in the way of hope, then, it is surely this vision of a reflective, attentive politics—and the reassurance that a failure of political vision does not straightforwardly map onto a failure of aesthetic imagination.