Review of The Decorated School. Essays in the Visual Culture of Schooling, published by Black Dog in October 2013

The review is written by Jon Wright for the Twentieth Century Society Journal.

This wonderful book is the culmination of a two year study funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council into the extent and significance of art as an integral part of the built environment of schools. Using examples from around the world, it looks at how artists, architects and educators collaborated in the C20 to create unique works of art. It’s a timely reminder of an overlooked bit of design history and material culture which still has important implications for how we make and view art, not just in schools, but in the wider public sphere. In that sense, it can be read as powerful testimony for paternalism in public art.

The full text of the review is accessible here

at http://www.c20society.org.uk/publications/c20-magazine/c20-magazine-2014-01/review-the-decorated-school-essays-on-the-visual-culture-of-schooling/

Cathy Burke

Our book, The Decorated School. Essays on the Visual Culture of Schooling is now published and available via the Black Dog website.

Use the following link to place your orders.

New Book published soon !

The Decorated School. Essays on the Visual Culture of Schooling is soon to be published by Black Dog.




see http://blackdogonline.com/all-books/the-decorated-school.html

Contributors have been participants in the research network. The book is beautifully illustrated and contains chapters with examples from England, Scotland, Norther Ireland, France, the USA, Japan and Kyrgystan. It has been funded with help from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and a generous grant from the Henry Moore Institute. Order your copies now !

Subjects include: the ‘Art at School’ movement in France; sculpture in Japanese schools, the Chicago mural movement; the Edinburgh ‘Schools Beautiful’ programme; the art-curriculum relationships of post-war British primary schools; London County Council’s educational commissions; Asger Jorn’s Decorations for Århus Statsgymnasium; abstraction and modern schooling in New York; Soviet and Post-Soviet school decoration in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan; and children’s art projects in Belfast.

The future of the Decorated School Research initiative

The Arts and Humanities Research Council funding of the Decorated School Research Network came to an end in February this year. There is scope now to put together an international research project drawing from the enormous interest that this blog has raised around the world. Please get in touch if you are interested in helping to shape the next stages of the research which can focus on looking more closely at how pupils and teachers respond over time to elements of decoration and colour in their school buildings.

The Decorated School International Conference 23.2.13

Venue:

Prendergast-Hilly Fields College

Adelaide Avenue
London
SE4 1LE

Google Map Link:

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=se4+1le&hl=en&ll=51.459462,-0.025921&spn=0.025777,0.036521&sll=56.229658,-3.14211&sspn=0.735891,1.168671&hnear=London+SE4+1LE,+United+Kingdom&t=m&z=15

It is strongly recommended you consult the Transport for London website to plan your route to the school:

http://www.tfl.gov.uk

Please allow at least 15 minutes to walk from all of the nearest stations - 

Underground stations:

Lewisham (DLR)

Overground:

Brockley

Crofton Park

Ladywell

Bus:

122, 484, P4, 284 all stop on Adelaide Avenue close to the school.

Robin Tanner remembered at Ivy Lane School

The artist Robin Tanner (1904-1988) taught at Ivy Lane Elementary School, Wiltshire between 1929-1935.

'Robin's classroom had four murals of the seasons on the walls: they weren't complete murals, but rather large pictures, and had been executed directly on the plaster'. These had been carried out by the children under Tanner's guidance.

The school has formally recognised the significance of these years by means of a blue plaque on the school wall. There is evidence that the school keeps the tradition of mural painting alive.

Website of the Chippenham Civic Society 

See 'Art and Craft: Marion Richardson and Robin Tanner' in Adventures in Education by Willem van der Eyken and Barry Turner, Penguin Press, 1969.

New Brunswick's Mural Legacy Symposium

New Brunswick’s Mural Legacy Symposium:  A Report

On 10 October, 2012, the Decorated School Network sponsored a symposium in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada entitled “New Brunswick’s Mural Legacy:  The State of the Art.”  The symposium took place on the campus of the University of New Brunswick in a new building, the Currie Center, that houses a mural with a story of interest to Decorated School researchers.

The mural is a re-creation of a mural commissioned in 1946 as a war memorial commemorating the war-dead of the province’s largest secondary school, Fredericton High School.  The artist, Fred Ross, who went on to a very successful career as an easel painter, was himself a recent high-school graduate and an aspiring professional muralist.  The mural, entitled The Destruction of the World Through War/Rebuilding the World Through Education, took Ross two years to complete and when unveiled, with much solemn ceremony at a well-publicized event in 1948, was the largest work of its kind in Canada.  Though the officials who spoke at the unveiling suggested the mural would serve as a reminder of the human costs of war for all time, in fact the mural only hung on the school’s auditorium walls for six years.  It was removed when the building was being renovated in 1954, lost, found (in damaged condition), lost again, found again, and lost for what seems to have been the final time in sometime in the early 1970s (this history was retold by local historian and artist John Leroux at the symposium).

A combination of circumstances led to the re-creation of the mural in the Currie Center where it was unveiled in June of 2011.  These included the fact that Fred Ross, though an octogenarian, was still a working artist able and willing to supervise the project; that the University was supportive, had the perfect space, and a sympathetic and generous private patron willing to help fund the re-creation; and, finally and very significantly, that a network of local artists, activists, and scholars had kept the memory of the mural (and its destruction) alive and helped push for this kind of restorative action.  Considering the work the Decorated School Network has been doing, the Currie Center was an appropriate venue for a symposium it supported to promote international scholarly cooperation.  All of the participants spent time viewing the re-created mural and it usefully raised issues that came up again and again in our discussions.  What makes a work of art in a public space meaningful?  How can such meaning, or value, be sustained for users of the space over time?  Which works, or kinds of works, get preserved (or in this case, re-created) and why?

These were the kind of questions addressed by Catherine Burke in her opening remarks to the symposium:  “The Decorated School: An interdisciplinary research network.”  Professor Burke, who spoke via video-link from Sweden, described the progress of the Decorated School network’s research to date, some of the key recurrent ideas and themes relevant to art in U. K. schools both past and present, and called for continued international collaboration and research.  The next speaker, Sylvia Rhor of Carlow University, provided a brief overview of the vast early 20th century mural collection in Chicago's public schools and the recent preservation of these works.  In particular, Rhor focused on the circumstances surrounding the censorship of Edward Millman's mural at Lucy Flower Technical High School (1941).  The whitewash covering this mural has now been removed and Rhor insightfully analyzed why, in form and content, Millman’s depiction of significant historical women was deemed inappropriate to be seen by the female students in the vocational school.

The international context provided by Burke and Rhor usefully framed the rest of the day’s discussion of the most notable decorations in New Brunswick schools:  modern murals produced between the 1930s and the 1950s.  In this period – influenced by mural movements in Mexico and the United States – New Brunswick artists produced a remarkable number of murals in public spaces.  Many were in schools, but the symposium also discussed murals prepared for hospitals and universities.  As one participant noted, what the murals shared was an “institutional audience” – they were designed for spaces which people visited for purposes other than contemplating art.  This might begin to explain why only a few of the murals of this era have survived in their original settings.  The symposium brought together historians, curators, conservators, local artists and heritage activists and the papers and  informal discussion prompted considerable thought about how these works can be interpreted in the present, preserved, and seen in relationship to one another and to the broader international context discussed by Rohr and Burke.

Formal papers were delivered Leroux and Kirk Niergarth, a historian at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, on the murals of Fred Ross and, in particular, the circumstances that led to the destruction and re-creation of the Fredericton High School war memorial mural.  Representatives from the New Brunswick Museum discussed murals prepared for hospitals by New Brunswick artist Miller Brittain.  Conservators Claire Titus and Jeanne Beaudry Tardif described their efforts to preserve the eleven enormous, full-scale cartoons Brittain prepared for a mural in the Saint John Tuberculosis Hospital.  This mural project was cancelled, but the cartoons themselves have been called the most important social realist work ever produced in Canada.  Because the images are unwieldy and fragile, they have been very rarely exhibited.  Titus and Beaudry’s efforts, allowing the public to access the space in which they have been working at the New Brunswick Museum have brought the cartoons back to public attention and have prompted discussions about creating the conditions for more permanent display.

Peter Larocque, curator at the Museum, gave a paper recounting the peripatetic history of a later mural Brittain executed in Saint John’s Veteran’s Hospital.  This mural, like Ross’, depicted the horror of war and the promise of peace.  When it moved from its original setting to, first, a retirement home and then the Saint John General hospital, the mural attracted complaints from those who objected to what they perceived as disturbing subject matter.  At one point, hospital employees circulating a petition calling for the murals removal.  Now the mural has found a home in the New Brunswick Museum and Larocque tried to explain what made the mural a difficult one with which to live.  The theme of hiding murals from view – whether through censorship in Millman’s case, neglect in Ross’ case, lack of continued patron support in Brittain’s early mural or in response to complaints in the case of his later one Brittain’s later one – was a repeated refrain in the symposium.

Gemey Kelly, curator at the Owens Art Gallery in Sackville New Brunswick, discussed the murals in Sackville by Alex Colville.  Colville was trained and worked at Mount Allison University in this small New Brunswick community and executed three murals there.  The first was a student project (now destroyed), depicting a railway scene in the community during the Second World War.  The second, executed while Colville was a faculty member, depicted the history of Mount Allison through a series of images.  The final mural, of athletics, is closest to Colville’s mature style as a highly successful easel painter.  Kelly displayed the many preliminary drawings owned by the Owens gallery that illustrate Colville’s process and evolution as a mural painter.

The final speaker of the afternoon, Professor Andrew Nurse of Mount Allison, has long reflected on and written about the relationship between art and society.  His challenge was to respond to the issues raised by the different papers and identify common themes.  Nurse highlighted four such themes:  1) humanism (as the underlying philosophy motivating works of the kind and the period discussed in the papers); 2) interdisciplinarity as a profitable strategy for researching this kind of art; 3)  history as a process of forgetting as well as remembering; and 4) the contextual and shifting meaning(s) of art in public spaces.  Nurse also applauded the combination of international and local perspectives at the symposium.  As he put it, “the story of New Brunswick's muralists is a story of mobility and influences, of artistic ideals, styles, and perspectives that move across borders but are also, then, localized in place to create public artistic expressions.”

After the presentations, symposium participants were afforded a visit to the vault of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton for a special viewing of the rarely displayed cartoons for Fred Ross’ mural City Slums, which was painted (and survives) in the Saint John Vocational School.  This concluded the day’s events, but participants have subsequently become involved in two publication projects.  The journal Acadiensis (the journal of the history of the Atlantic region) has invited participants to publish short versions of their papers in a “Forum.”  And several of the participants have been invited by the editor of the journal Labour/Le Travail (journal of Canadian Labour Studies) to make submissions comparing the Canadian and American history of murals in Vocational Schools.  These publications will certainly acknowledge the Decorated Schools Network.  All attendees of the symposium owe the Decorated Schools Network a debt of gratitude for providing the impetus and the opportunity to participate in such a stimulating and fruitful scholarly event.


Kirk Niergarth
Assistant Professor, History
Department of Humanities
Mount Royal University

Related links:

Ross mural re-creation:

http://amyash.squarespace.com/storage/telegraph%20journal%20fred%20ross%20mural.pdf

http://www.newbrunswickbeacon.ca/12153/lost-treasure-2/

Brittain’s  Murals:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/story/2012/05/25/nb-miller-brittain-restoration.html

http://arttattler.com/archivemillerbrittain.html

Colville’s murals:

http://www.mta.ca/owens/colville/timeline/index.php

The St Andrews Decorated School Student Symposium

To School? The St Andrews Decorated School Student Symposium
was held on 21 November 2012

Programme:  

1.30 Welcome

1.40-3.00 First Session: School Art (Questions of Community, ‘The Child’, Success, Failure, Quality, Ideology and Artistic Personality)

1.    Emma Duff: Two Schools in Belfast

2.    Lucy Thomas: Eton Graffiti

3.    Julia Lysogorova: A School in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

4.    Charlotte Dare: The National Preparatory School, Mexico

5.    Georgie Inglis: The Martin Luther King School, Cambridge, Mass.

6.    Taylor Poppmeier: Martin Luther King School, Cambridge and The Ministry of Public Education, Mexico City

7.    Chloe Lieberman: The William Penn Charter School, Philadelphia

8.    Livia Marinescu: Dalry Primary School

3.00-3.30 Tea Break (Barns-Graham Room and Break Out Space)

3.30-5.00 Second Session: (School Art: From Infants to Higher Education Spaces, and Libraries; Questions of Form, Era, Place and Permanence)

1.    Anne-Pauline Mimran: An Infants’ School in Paris

2.    Juliana Cusack: Westville Road (Greenside) School, London

3.    Imogen Kwok: Obernai and Kvernhuset Schools

4.    Hannah Anderson: Scotland Street School, Glasgow

5.    Aiden Bowman: School Libraries

6.    Lucy Tittle: Oxford Union (Old Library) Murals

7.    Giedre Zlatkute: Vilnius University Murals

8.    Claire Abrahamson: Sculpture at Yale University

9.    Hayley Daen: Art Rental at Oberlin College, Ohio

5.00-5.15 Discussion and Thanks

 (For presentation videos see Events)

    

Forum article and editorial comment by Michael Fielding

Catherine Burke. The Decorated School: past potency and present patronage, pages 465–471 FORUM Volume 54, Number 3, 2012 www.wwwords.co.uk/FORUM

Here is an extract from the editorial in the issue written by Michael Fielding.

The absolute importance of history and, in particular, the history of education in our own countries is again underscored by Catherine Burke’s The Decorated School: past potency and present patronage. Not only does it help us understand the origins of the present, it helps us re-see what presumption, exhaustion and hegemonic incorporation too often obscure, distort or discard. In the remarkable Decorated School project academics, young people, teachers and community members are coming together to rediscover, and in some cases restore, the murals, reliefs, stained glass, wall tiles, decorated floors, textile and sculptures that once formed part of a movement in education that exemplified Henry Morris’s beliefs about the educative power of the built environment which preface the article thus: ‘The design, decoration and equipment of our places of education cannot be regarded as anything less than of first-rate importance -- as equally important, indeed, as the teacher. There is no order of precedence -- competent teachers and beautiful buildings are of equal importance and equally indispensable.’ It is difficult to think of a more stark contrast to the recent government insistence that new state schools ‘should have ‘no curves or ‘faceted’ curves’, corners should be square, ceilings should be left bare and buildings should be clad in nothing more expensive than render or metal panels above head height. As much repetition as possible should be used to keep costs down’ (Booth, 2012). Of the many fascinating issues that emerge in the article amongst the most compelling is the journey from public art as itself an educator, through its partial displacement by the sometimes invasive imperative to display children’s work, via the managerialist arrogance of supplanting both with curtains of concealment and the self-regarding installation of carpeted corridors to the headteacher’s office (a real example from the paper!), through to the co-option of both art and architecture in the drive to contrive a simulacra of distinctive school ethos as a key seducer of parental choice in the education market-place. Trying to map and understand this journey, not only through actual artifacts and written records, but also through interviews with children to try to understand what sense they made of ‘the removal, concealment or destruction of art objects that had become a feature of their everyday worlds’ is a profoundly important undertaking.

BBC report on the restoration of Fred Millett's murals at St Crispin's School, Wokingham

Thanks to the efforts of the present head teacher and school governor, Robin Cops, two of the three murals of the seasons by Fred Millett have been recovered at St Crispin's School, Wokingham, after being concealed under thick gloss paint for 40 years. Click on the link to watch a TV report celebrating the recovery with comments by pupils and the daughters of Oliver Cox, architect who also produced  murals for the school including one shown here.

BBC Report

L'Art et L'Enfant: An Exhibition at the French National Museum of Education, Rouen

An exhibition entitled 'L'art et l'enfant: L'éducation esthétique du XIX siècle à nos jours' opened recently (19 October) at the French National Museum of Education in Rouen. It runs until 1 September 2013. It is remarkable not just for breaking new conceptual ground but also for the quality of its exhibits, extent of its vision and the subtlety of its 'voice'.

The exhibition is the brainchild of Annie Renonciat, Professor at the École normale supériore Lyon, a renowned specialist on the relationships of childhood and imagery, and a much valued contributor to the Decorated School Research Network. It illustrates, both historically and thematically, the development of the fostering of children's artistic sensibilities, talents and abilities. The first section, 'From "scribbler" to "child artist"', commences with an introduction to ideas concerning aesthetic education in eighteenth century France. Charles Hardiviller's '10 a.m. Drawing Lesson' from the 'A Day in the Life of a Young Exile' set of colour lithographs published by Alexander Hill of Edinburgh and Fonrouge of Paris in 1832 caught my eye. The section subsequently reviews the methods of modern propagators of aesthetic pedagogy from Gaston Quénioux, through Pauline Kergomard, Maria Montessori, Germaine Tortel, and Élise and Célestin Freinet, to Gérard Garouste. The large and welcome range of children's art that is examined includes, for instance, drawing, calligraphy, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, photography and 'little hands'' needlework. The 'initiation' art encouraged by Tortel and the 'free drawing' approach of the Freinets in the mid-twentieth century were unexpected discoveries for me.

Economic, social and moral objectives for aesthetic education and the 'wrapping of children in an artistic atmosphere' are studied, with their combination coming to fore, in the section called 'Art at Home'. Ideas for 'children's rooms', plus samples of wallpapers, bedroom fabrics, toys, illustrated books and images, are displayed, these dating from the late nineteenth century on. The activities of such early twentieth century associations such as 'L'Art et l'enfant' (from 1908) and the Société des amateurs de jeux et de jouets anciens (from 1905) are revealed, alongside the products and advertisements of commercial enterprises and publishers, such as Magasins du Printemps, Grand Magasins du Louvre and Hachette. Particularly striking are the simple painted wooden nursery toys by Caran d'Ache and André Hellé (Tsar Nicholas II hunting, of 1908, by the former, and Noah's Ark, of 1910, by the latter). Also attractive are the vivacious and sensitive decorative designs, cloths and papers for children's rooms from the 1920s and 1950s. Benjamin Rabier of 'La vache qui rit' fame, stands out for the variety and strength of his artistic output for children. The superb child-centred (mainly sixties) photographs of Pierre Allard and Jean Suquet, of which the museum has a vast collection, are highly evocative and utilised with a great sense of selection.

The section of 'Art at School' begins with Jules Ferry's creation of the Commission for the Decoration of Schools and School Imagery' in 1880, looks at the initiatives of the L'Art à l'école society (established 1907), teaching through images, didactic games and illustrated puzzles, decorative designs by children (and manuals for these), the artistic design of awards and diplomas, the decoration and illustration of school books, art and the new education of the 1930s, 'the beautiful for the price of the ugly' of the fifties, and contemporary art books for children. Examples of 'decorated schools' include the following: images of the seventeenth century Chapel of the Jesuit School in Rouen; watercolour maquette drawings of the decoration of the École Normale Primaire de Chartres (1884); photographs of French Third Republic school palaces; an intriguing postcard of the study room, complete with Maurice Denis style murals of children learning in nature, at 'La Ruche - Le Patis', the 'Hive' primary school founded on libertarian principles by the anarchist Sébastien Faure near Rambouillet (Yvelines); and some refined flora and fauna-based frieze and stencil designs made in 1927 by children from the Coopératives scolaires of Saint-Jean d'Angély.

The exhibition culminates in a photographic survey of the world of the decorated school beyond France. The twenty-eight images reveal polychromatic and plastic facades, stained glass, winter gardens, murals and sculptures that embellish school institutions from Victorian Northumberland and 1900s continental Europe, to interwar Brighton, Edinburgh and Barcelona, postwar Hertfordshire and Yorkshire, and late twentieth century Australia and New Zealand. The visual articulation of distinct aesthetic and ideological purpose is represented, with connections being made to national, local and communal identity, history, literature, mathematics, religion, science, youth and, inevitably, art itself.

There is much more to this exhibition than I have time to 'report' here. I recommend visiting in person, for each vitrine, each wall and each section contains a wealth of inspiring sources for keen eyes and minds...

Wall needed for Robert Stewart ceramic mural

Douglas Academy was opened in Milngavie, East Dunbartonshire, Scotland, in 1967. By 2009 the school was deemed no longer fit for purpose and a new PPP-funded school was built in its place.

Thanks to Peter Trowles, Mackintosh Curator at the Glasgow School of Art, the ceramic mural by Robert Stewart that was created for the original building at the time of its construction has been saved. There's one problem. The 800 or so tiles are sitting in crumbling cardboard boxes and lack a wall. Peter and a colleague spent two days painstakingly removing the tiles from their doomed site when the school was about to be demolished. What is now needed is a wall, preferably something around five metres by three metres, for the mural to be relocated to. In fact, the central block of the mural measures around 1.5 x 1.5 metres, so, at a push, a space that size would do.

I've already written about the significance of Bob Stewart on this blog, in relation to his similarly threatened mural at Eastwood High School, Newton Mearns.

As school estate is rebuilt, or being considered for redevelopment, more and more artworks have questionable futures. The Stewart at Milngavie was given considerable attention by Liz Arthur in her monograph on the artist (pp.125 and 127), and from the images and text its historic place is clear. Apparently 'inspired by the sight of a seagull passing in front of the sun while Stewart was lying on his back looking at the sky on holiday on Oronsay', this strong, polychromatic abstract work is a sixties icon that pays homage to Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style. Its days within a school environment might be over but surely it is worth reinstalling somewhere for all to see.

Students of the 'To School?' honours and postgraduate modules in the Art History department at the University of St Andrews were shown tiles from the mural when they visited the Glasgow School of Art, the cradle of Stewart's career between 1949 and 1984, on 10 October 2012. That same day they (and I) also participated in the research seminar dedicated to 'Sculpture in Schools' at Glasgow University's Institute of Art History.

'Any idea what the sculpture might be worth ?' The story of Gladys or 'Welcome' by Peter Peri, Greenhead College, Huddersfield 1961-2012.

'Welcome' 

The title of this post is a direct quote from a journalist who was seeking a commission to write an article suitable for publication in a mainstream educational journal, The Times Educational Supplement. The question was put to me about ‘Welcome’, a sculpture by Peter Laszlo Peri (1899-1967) which has been removed from the outside wall of Greenhead College in Huddersfield, England, after having been placed there 50 years ago. ‘Welcome’ or Gladys as she was affectionately known was an integral part of the building and the school grounds reaching out to the community beyond the school. Plans to build an extension to the college building required the removal of the sculpture to another place on site. However, on inspection, it was declared to be unsafe and a danger to the school community and was speedily and rather brutally removed.

Removed at the ankles

Immediately after removal

It is not known who dressed Gladys in this recent photograph

The Henry Moore Institute at Leeds holds a collection of drawings and photographs by Peri including over 300 drawings, c.1930-1960, among which are ideas for work and drawings relating to specific sculptures. Many of the scenes depicting children relate to commissions for schools from the 1950s, mostly for Leicestershire Education Authority. 

Peri produced a vast amount of sculpture for schools during the 1950s and 60s, the decades that saw leaders of Local Educational Authorities signifying their commitment to a modern state education through the inclusion of work by some of the best modernist artists in modern buildings. Peri’s school work includes

• 1955 Oadby Primary School. Three coloured reliefs.
• 1956 Scraptoft South Primary School. Horizontal concrete group.
• 1956 Scraptoft North Primary School. Folk dancing, coloured concrete relief.
• 1956 Earl Shilton Grammar School. Three dimensional sculpture.
• 1957 Wigston Secondary Modern School. The living Christ.
• 1957 Castle Donington Secondary Modern School. The boy with the book and the globe. Horizontal.
• 1958 Longslade Grammar School. The mastery of atom = self mastery. Horizontal ^[6].
• 1959 Loughborough College of Technology. Diagonal concrete sculpture.
• 1959 Hinckley College for further education. Cut out concrete relief

• 1957 Willenhall Primary School. Three dimensional sculpture.
• 1958 Coventry. St. Michael Primary School. Coloured concrete relief.
• 1965 Ernesford Grange Junior School, Coventry. Sculpture and relief. Polyester
• 1961 Huddersfield High School for Girls. Now Greenhead College  Horizontal sculpture and a relief.
• 1964 Long Eaton Secondary Modern. Three dimensional sculpture.

The ‘education of the eye’ was taken very seriously in the post war years in England and this was not only a matter of aesthetics but also of equity and democracy. It was acknowledged that the majority of children attending state schools would be unlikely to ever enter an art gallery or museum and so the school itself should become a canvas for the arts. Aesthetic and design education would become part of the role that the built environment played in stimulating and awakening the artist in the child and nurturing their creative capacities. Was this naïve ? Or have we lost a sense of the value of living and learning amongst material things of beauty and intrinsic artistic worth? Is this a generational issue? If adults in schools have lost a sense of the educational value of such things is this true also of pupils?

We do not know very much about children’s appreciation of such art over time in school buildings and grounds because we have until now failed to ask the appropriate questions. We do know, however, that children habitually and naturally attach and ascribe meaning to material objects in school grounds and use these in story building, play and place marking. It is quite possible that Henry Morris was correct when he argued in the 1930s, 

We shall not bring about any improvement in standards of taste by lectures and preachings; habitation is the golden method. Buildings that are well-designed and equipped and beautifully decorated will exercise their potent, but unspoken, influence on those who use them from day to day. This is true education.

The question regarding the value of this particular sculpture in 2012 is inevitably central to any public campaign to preserve such examples of The Decorated School that may arise in the future. The question leads directly to a consideration of the significance of the artist, usually in the context of their life’s work and wider legacy. In the past, when these same artists installed their works, this was not a consideration. While as far as possible the best and most innovative artists available were commissioned, the signature on the work was academic: what was deemed important was the influence these objects would quietly wield on the lives of generations of children, their teachers and parents. Whether this happened to any extent is difficult to know since, to our knowledge, no research has been carried out to investigate how children have responded to the long term presence of such features in their schools. But certainly, the notion that what experts have determined as high or high quality art might operate on children's personalities, civilizing them in the process has become seriously questioned in a culture that has democratized art's production and consumption. The monetary value of these works of art is now a necessary part of the rationale that justifies their preservation. Certainly, their part in the general educational experience has for many decades been supplanted by other priorities. 

In 1974, Robert Winston Witkin argued in The Intelligence of Feeling for a curriculum that recognized emotional and ‘sensate' dimensions to learning. He also argued the aesthetic dimension as being as key to the making of modern societies as it has been to the making of pre-modern societies. Is Gladys a metaphor for the place of the arts in the curriculum in relation to more securely valued subjects and preoccupations?

Dr Catherine Burke