Nick Lovegrove

An article on the importance of teaching creative subjects in Indian schools. Published in the January 2011 issue of Pool Magazine, an Indian monthly design journal. They let me design the layout too, which was nice of them.

“If you ask most people what they enjoyed doing when they were kids, most would give similar answers: perhaps playing with toys, hanging out with friends or avoiding getting into trouble. I was quite content in front of a drawing board, armed with set squares and a box of colouring pencils. I could spend hours, lost in my own world whilst drawing maps, graphs and bits of lettering. This wasn’t a hobby, it was homework set my my school teachers. They encouraged me to do what I enjoyed, suggesting ways to improve and were rarely negative. I stuck with the idea of studying what i enjoyed and ended up, unsurprisingly, becoming a graphic designer.

However, I wasn’t unique. I grew up in the UK in the 1980s, when taking creative subjects were compulsory. In my secondary school, all pupils had to study Design & Communication (a mixture of technical drawing and graphic design), Design & Technology (three-dimensional design) as well as Art until the age of 13.

My school has nurtured successful artists, animators, textile designers, as well as more than a few talented graphic designers. It wasn’t a particularly unusual school either, just an ordinary government run institution following the national curriculum. Having been involved with the Indian education system over the last eighteen months, I realise how lucky my schoolmates and I were.

It is no coincidence that the UK is one of the world’s creative hubs. The country’s creative businesses are a key component in the so-called ‘knowledge economy’. Government figures show that the UK’s creative industries accounted for nearly two million jobs and added an estimated £112.5 billion per year to the country’s economy.

Sir Ken Robinson, the leading academic has been campaigning for many years that teaching creativity in schools is as important as teaching literacy. His brilliant talks at high profile conferences are well worth watching (bit.ly/4JnO). Although his ideas have yet to be implemented on a large scale, he remains an influential voice. Of course, he is referring to Western education policies, his realm of professional experience has been in the UK and US. What then, would he make of India’s education policy which, from an outsiders perspective, is a curious throwback to almost Victorian-era teaching practices?

I now teach Graphic Design at degree level in Bangalore and even though a reasonable number of my students have attended International schools, very few of them have had the opportunity to study any sort of creative subject as part of their official education. A few have pursued drawing and photography in their own time but the focus in schools, almost always, appears to be about grinding out exam results in the traditional core subjects. Although they show plenty of promise, my students have a tendency to look for the correct answer, where quite often there isn’t one. There is a reluctance to be experimental or to stand out from the crowd, both of which are vital traits of a successful designer.

Teresa Cremin, a professor of education in the UK and an expert on creativity in primary schools agrees with Robinson. “If you have a school system which rewards conformity and avoids risk-taking, then youngsters will be unable to cope with the world unfolding before them.”

Today’s world sees Indian businesses coming to the west in search of creative solutions. In 2006 one of London’s largest post-production facilities was bought by Prime Focus, India’s largest film and TV effects firm. It now produces large numbers of TV adverts for the Indian market.

Why can’t these adverts be made in India? It’s not because there is a lack of technical knowledge here, it’s because there is a perceived lack of creative, imaginative individuals who can work at the highest level. Again, why does a company like Tata feel that they have to use a UK based consultancy, Wolff Olins, to launch the DoCoMo brand in India?

It’s ludicrous to think that India has less naturally-creative people than the West. However, there is an unarguable shortage of people who have been educated to think creatively; to maximise the potential that so many people possess. This potential is either hounded out of them by an out-of-date education system, parental pressure or is simply left undeveloped because of a lack of access or opportunity to good design education.

Lots has been written in recent years about the particular skills that Indians naturally possess. The boom in the IT industry has, for many people, confirmed the idea that Indians have a natural bias towards mathematics; to logical, organisational ways of thinking. Supposedly, this results in huge numbers of highly skilled programmers, engineers and managers.

In my experience, it’s a flawed theory. Indian’s predisposition to these sorts of jobs is purely down to the nature of the education that the vast majority of the population receive. India’s rich cultural history, stretching back thousands of years, helps to disprove this view. This history is also an encouraging sign of what’s possible in the future if there is a move away from such rigid, conventional teaching methods.

Indeed, there is a growing school of thought that people from a design background, rather than those trained in traditional business schools, are often more suitable for management roles. A designer’s ability to think laterally, free from conventions, as well as a tendency to work well in collaborative situations are extremely desirable traits for a forward thinking business. In his 2008 article for the Harvard Business Review Tim Brown, CEO of international design firm IDEO, wrote:

“I believe that design thinking has much to offer a business world in which most management ideas and best practices are freely available to be copied and exploited. Leaders now look to innovation as a principal source of differentiation and competitive advantage; they would do well to incorporate design thinking into all phases of the process.”

He goes on to explain the importance of this to countries like India: “As economies in the developed world shift from industrial manufacturing to knowledge work and service delivery, innovation’s terrain is expanding. It’s objectives are no longer just physical products; they are new sorts of processes, services, IT powered interactions, entertainments and ways of collaborating – exactly the kinds of human-centered activities in which design thinking can make a difference.”

As India’s economy diversifies, away from it’s current core industries, there will be a ever-growing need for those who can innovate; to stop being what Pavan K Varma, in his book Being Indian calls “the hard-working cogs in someone else’s creative wheel.” All these points ignore the wider value that creative education adds to society. Attempting to justify why art and design in schools is important in purely economic terms arguably propagates the myth that schools are simply there to churn out fresh workers.

Why shouldn’t developing someone’s ability to express themselves be enough of a goal in it’s own right? Creating something new, using an idea that is entirely your own, is arguably just as satisfying as receiving good exam results or gaining a promotion at work.

Who knows what wider benefits universal creative education would bring to society? Rabindranath Tagore suggested in 1920 that “engaging in processes of creation … is critical to the meaningful development of both personality and human relationships.” Surely giving more people the opportunity to explore their potential could only ever have positive consequences?

So what do I propose? A simple solution would be to make Art a compulsory subject up to 8th standard. However these would have to be based on a new curriculum, devised to stretch pupils imagination as well as their aesthetic sense. Too often art classes, both here and abroad, are based on producing work in the style of whatever art movement they have just studied.

This isn’t creative, it’s the visual equivalent of the rote-learning methods traditionally used to teach mathematics. It just encourages the lazy, imitation culture that results in Bollywood’s uncredited remakes of Hollywood titles or industrial firms meekly copying Western designs, rather than developing their own.

Of course, thinking creatively can be taught at a later stage. However, it’s much harder getting people to ‘unlearn’ all those years of conformism than it is to simply build on what thought processes are already there. Teaching adults ‘how to think’ is a multi-million dollar industry. ‘Self-help’ books seem to be even more popular in India than they are in the rest of the world, judging by the amount of space they take up in bookstores here. Thinking experts like Edward De Bono and have earned fortunes by serving the public’s desire to be more creative. If the right side of young people’s minds were stretched more, perhaps we wouldn’t need all this guidance in later life.

For those that can think creatively, India is a great place to be at the moment. In Bangalore, I can count the number of design studios doing genuinely decent, creative graphic design with the fingers on one hand. For a city of six million people and with as many businesses based here as it does, this represents a huge opportunity for young, talented designers who are brave enough to set up their own studio.”

© Nick Lovegrove 2010