The Art and Education Party: Proposed manifesto for a new movement
Statement of principles
1. Everyone is an artist (J. Beuys); everyone is an intellectual (A. Gramsci). That means we all make sense of our experiences, and want to and can do so in ways that are meaningful and productive. The key to intellectual and artistic life is the concepts of the ‘interesting’ and of enjoyment; art tends to be both.
2. We can think of our society as consisting of mostly mentally ill people who need social control and help to be able to live their lives (and do the things expected of them). Or we can think of it as one in which many abnormal people are dangerous and potential criminals. Both of these ways of thinking assume that if there is a problem, someone is to blame, because someone is behaving wrongly. But there is an alternative. We say, it is not the case that everyone is sick or a potential criminal; rather, everyone is an artist and an intellectual, and a person and citizen properly concerned to live a good life and desire the happiness of the society and its members.
3. Most people are smart and interested in things that make good sense to be involved with from the standpoint of interest in the good life of self and society. Notably, there are very large audiences for art forms such as popular music, film, and television. This is an extremely positive and hopeful sign. We should want to have a society of artists, not one of laborers.
4. People should talk about what artworks they enjoy mean. Schools should teach this as a skill useful to a good life, and the government should encourage it.
5. A consumer society is still one of laborers. Consumers pay for the things they use, and they pay costs in time and energy in the communicative process that must uses of things now require. (These things are profit sources for companies, but their costs are borne by consumers.).
6. A post-consumer society of artists can replace a morality based on property (and its opposites marked by its lack, crime and abnormality or sickness) with one of free use. People should have, or enjoy the use of, things they need or (generally) want, and this should be ‘counted’ separately from doing the things they should do.
7. The purpose of an education is to train people to live happily and participate usefully in the common life of the society. This education should continue throughout a person’s life. Resources should be devoted to facilitating this. Training for jobs and careers is a secondary purpose at best.
8. We oppose the way life is organized today. Most people spend the better part of their time and lives doing things whose primary utility is in the profits generated by companies that employ people, sell them things they supposedly need, and otherwise find ways to use people’s experiences and capacities to collect payments from them that contribute to companies’ profits.
9. There is today a crisis of the managed society. It is far too managed. Far too many people are employed in the management or social control of other people. Many jobs are not socially useful and so really needed. It is possible now to reduce the number of hours most people work. This means cutting back or eliminating many jobs and spreading the available work so that no one is needlessly unemployed. All this is related to the persistence of capitalism.
10. A major public policy objective must be to maximize the amount of time that citizens have to spend as they wish, and minimize the costs in money, time, or use of informational systems of this.
Information systems and social media
11. All Internet, computer, and social media companies should be publicly owned and organized to promote the spreading of information that people find useful or interesting as widely as possible.
12. These systems should not be used to collect data on individuals, either for purposes of governance or for profitable marketing.
13. All art, entertainment, scientific, scholarly, and informational materials and resources must be available to anyone at no charge. Artists and independent scholars should be paid by the state.
From the “mental health” paradigm to an art and education one
14. Pharmaceutical and conversational treatments for “mental illness” should be replaced by learning opportunities, including psychoanalytic treatments. All coercive treatments and hospitalizations must be ended. There can be no presumption that a person is dangerous as a potential criminal because of their personality or supposed psychological or medical disorder.
15. Medical and social work personnel should not be employed to perform police duties, and people should not see doctors or therapists who surveil their lives like probation officers do convicts. We have a system where these professionals are expected to be far less concerned with how you can live the happiest life than whether you stay out of trouble. They are always looking for trouble or signs of it so that they can manage it.
Public schooling
16. Primary and secondary education should be funded nationally out of federal income tax, instead of the present local property tax funding system, which is a cause of racial segregation and wide differentials in the quality of schooling by the economic status and social class of a child’s parents. (The determination of what is taught in schools should also not be entirely local but at least partly national.)
17. Public schools should return to books instead of non-literate exercises, and use written essay exams instead of the multiple-choice tests that now predominate.
18. Required courses must include literature in English and at least one other language, including languages commonly spoken in the US such as Spanish. They should also include philosophy, taught partly as a method of individual critical thinking.
19. Every public school student should be given the chance, at no special or extra cost, to learn an art form suitable to their talents and tastes, such as a musical instrument, dance, visual art, creative writing, etc.
Higher education
20. All higher education should be free of charge. It should not be funded by loans and debts.
21. All student loan debts should be forgiven.
22. Universities must stop hiring non-tenure-track instructional personnel, give all of them paid time for research and writing, and pay them at professional rates.
23. There are not enough professional scholars and professors. Independent scholarship needs to be promoted and funded, along with work in the arts. But also, there need to be more professorships, and involving research as well as teaching.
24. Universities should not be run as private corporations or on a corporate business model. Their administration should include legislative bodies of both faculty and students.
25. Educational institutions also should not be run exclusively on an administrative governance and justice model. Any student accused of wrongdoing should enjoy the benefits of an adversarial system of justice in any campus proceeding, not one that in the interest of informality or a presumed unanimity of values is run on a model that combines administrative and prosecutorial purposes. It is not the task of these administrative personnel to enforce local morals and political values. Freedom of speech should be rigorously protected, even what that speech is unpopular or someone claims to be made uncomfortable by it.
26. There needs to be funding for research and study of foreign and classical languages that are not always popular or being taught. There should be a good number of professorships in every major world language (“major” by any definition) and a number of minor ones.
27. All academic paywalls must be removed. Anyone wanting to read a piece of scientific or scholarly writing should be able to do so at no cost.
28. University libraries should be open to the public as well as independent scholars and researchers.