I said in an earlier post that I would answer some hard questions Twyla Tharp posits in her book on the creative habit. My disclaimer is that I don’t believe in everything Tharp puts forward in the two books of hers I have read. I like hard work, but I certainly don’t think everyone should like what I like, or, that working hard makes one person “better” than another person, neither in art nor production nor as a person. What one person strives to complete, may be play for another. In short, there are all kinds of ways to live; I am not sure the Protestant Work Ethic hasn’t had as much to show its weaknesses as its worths.

It’s also a bit of a red flag that one of the two books I got of Tharp’s (both Christmas gifts) is touted as a great business book. Not that I am against business, but I am not sure about business. I am not sure about many endeavors, and I am not sure why I should (given the current economic climate, the climate climate, etc.) be sure. In the book Tharp gives advice about how to work with people you don’t want to work with, focusing particular advice on how to manage an out-of-touch boss. Again, this is being touted as a great business book. We are being advised often on how to manage out-of-touch bosses. How often this comes up in books and in practice makes me feel like:

How did we get here? What has happened that, by being out of touch, a person gets promoted to “boss”? Or, is it, that the nature of hierarchies is to ensure the boss is out of touch?

In any case, what does this have to do with art? To Tharp, lots of art is about leadership, discipline, and collaboration. More or less like getting anything done in most spheres. Collaboration has gotten a bad rap in the past as touchy-feely, and now after almost a decade of the new millenium, it seems to be everywhere–what lots of hierarchical institutions now want their members to do: come together, yeah. Years ago at the New School for Social Research when I was doing my master’s degree in the science of teaching Cynthia Onore, the program’s head, focused our learning on collaboration. We learned in teams and in cohorts. We practiced how we would have our students learn. We threw fits due to not having had a lot of previous practice in collaboration, but under their stead (it’s a damn shame the New School got rid of that program in the 90s) we grew unafraid to work together, and thus, we were unafraid of our students working together when we went into our classrooms. My point? Collaboration took a lot of practice. Huge stakes also were not at stake. We weren’t going to lose millions if we misstepped. And, granted, we were probably a touchy-feely lot to begin with: we’d willingly entered a program to become teachers focused on the needs of urban students.

Oh, I digress. Okay. The questions. Soon. I will post them next post. The questions that concern what one is as an artist. See, my beef, too, with Tharp is that she comes from the school of “well, just pick one!” In one scene she writes of how much she loves color and design and that she also could have been a painter, that maybe she would have been happy being a painter. But she talked herself out of it. Do this, not that.

I can’t say I am not in a struggle over that. My life, my public life and work life, really, rather than my social one, has been a tug between social cause and education work, which, have their expectations, socially and publicly, and creative work–writing, music, performance– which have theirs. The first is a more socially conservative realm with the specter of the Progressive-era school marm and prudish reformer flying above it looking to clean up the working classes and bring everyone to middle class propriety. The second, it’s safe to say its specter is not of a school marm.

To really have a country that is able to focus on innovation, able to compete in the new creative economy, able to break forth and solve the dire, dire, dire problems we face: I ask, are the right people even teachers? The right people involved in solving social issues?

A year or so ago I entered a competition to potentially win a fellowship to start a school in Los Angeles. The people running the competition were excited about me till I turned in my proposal. Albeit I crammed in too much in terms of the local demographics, I also focused on the “what next?” after college. I’ve been that teacher–the one expounding college. But, I also had every junior high school class of mine, after my first full year of teaching, do a career project, in which they researched and presented a project on career of their choice (save being a musician, model, actor, or athlete–they could do a project on an adjacent career, not exactly on those). We traced what it would take to potentially reach those dreams.

Nonetheless, in my proposal, I focused on relationships for our inner-city students. Life had taught me that having the right degree was, by a long shot, not enough. You need to know people. People need to trust that you can do a good job. How do you get to know people that could employ you or trust you if the potential employer you seek is not a member of your own community? I think this did not sit well with the career-educators judging the competition.  My guess is they had been rewarded for being good students, wouldn’t everyone?

Teachers, on the other hand, are involved in a deep bureaucracy. If they take certain classes, pass certain tests, get the right credential, and, then, also know someone, they get a job. They keep this job as long as they do okay, take some more classes, pass some more tests, behave. How many other types of jobs work like that any more?

Many people I know get their jobs through a combination of having the hard skills and also by having the soft skills of networking, by being someone other people want to be around, etc. You can have all the college degrees in the world, but if no one knows you that is in the hiring class, then you may not get the kind of job the teachers back in school promised you.

It’s happening now. A lot of kids coming out of college and having nowhere to go, and that is not just due to the economy–they don’t have access to the people that are hiring. They were told that if they just went to college, they would soon have a middle class life and be doing something fulfilling, more fulfilling than minimum wage work. They were told they could reach their dreams…. like their teachers had? Like their college professors had? If the kids coming out of college do get jobs, they are often lower administrative positions in which they are paid peanuts for also having skills their baby boomer bosses don’t have: social networking, web design, blogging, etc. Ah, the good life.

What would happen if the school marm yokes were lifted from the schools? What would happen if a league of artists were brought in, circumventing the regular hoops, and brought a group of students from ninth to twelfth grades? Maybe add to this group of artists a group of entrepreneurs and mentors out in the community– What if schools taught classes in innovation, design, entrepreurship, collaboration, networking and then students got out into communities to work, thereby making contacts that might hire them once they go to college?