Speech by Danielle Souness delivered at Hi-Arts conference in Fort William, 4th June 2003.
Ladies and Gentlemen.
Last year after I had run a couple of workshops and spoken at a conference in Stirling organised by ‘Children in Scotland’ I remember discussing with Mr Fairley the problems we had come across in trying to explain exactly what Room 13 is. We decided that there was probably two sides to the story…the adult side and our side. I presume he has already told you his side so let me now tell you the important bits.
Right from the start Room 13 has been run by us. Years ago when Jackie Cameron and Tina Love persuaded Mr Fairley that he should continue to come into Caol it operated only on Fridays. Slowly we have been able to extend it so that it really now never closes... as during the school holidays we either have workshops and stuff or we can keep in touch by e mail. The fact that we are in charge is very important. I think that ever since I was quite wee I knew that there was a difference between learning and learning in school. The first was easy but, in school you have to … and I do mean have to… learn things that a teacher thinks you have to learn. I do not have any real problem with this after all the idea of learning is to get knowledge from people who are knowledgeable. BUT in school you are only allowed to learn things up to a standard that a teacher thinks you can understand and you have to go at roughly the same speed as the rest of the class. In Caol we are very very lucky because we have a brilliant head teacher called Miss Cattanach and the best class teacher in the world called Mrs Smith AND Room 13 and between all of us we are working together to find new ways to change this.
Every teacher and every pupil knows that in any class there are people with different skills and interests. We (the students) know that we are all good at something but all we are judged on is our ability to fill in workbooks. Some people are really good at this…some people even buy similar sorts of things to fill in time on bus and train journeys….you know the sort of thing … quiz and game books. Some people are really bad at it. Some people find it very boring. But we all have to do it. However I do not think it really helps you to learn. Anybody can look at the examples given on each page and work out the answer required and those who struggle are often just bored by the whole idea. It teaches you how to think about how to answer questions but it does not actually tell you why the question exists.
Most people my age want to learn. We want to do things. (OK there are one or two who don’t….but most of us do.) What Room 13 does is to allow us to take control of our learning. We can use the studio when ever we want with the only rule being that we must never fall behind with our class work. (workbooks). As I write this I think I have actually spent an hour in class in the last week (for a health education talk) but I have had long discussions with Mrs Smith on lots of things and I have not let myself get behind.
Let me try and describe a typical scene in Room 13. Imagine a typical sized classroom but with magnificent views from Aonach Mor to Corran. The room is pretty untidy. It has no desks and the only tables are round the walls. Eileen and I were putting together the NESTA funding bid we have spent days working out costings , building spreadsheets, writing letters and attending meetings….one of which needed me to go to London (which was brilliant! ) Eileen had all our costs worked out for the next three years down to the last penny. We had to talk to accountants and lawyers about things like VAT.( If there is anything you need to know about VAT…. ask Eileen as we even had to phone Customs and Excise to check things!) We learnt loads….and not a workbook in site! I know some of you are thinking that that is OK for a special project but while Eileen and I were working, in other parts of the room life went on as normal, others our class were discovering why grammar is useful and why it works, by looking at Latin and other languages. Some of the boys were discussing physics and geometry with Mr Fairley …. actually they were discussing a football match but it all seemed to fit with maths. Somebody will be sitting in a corner reading and eating their lunch. (only it is not lunchtime) A couple from another class will be working on a photography project and two or three from P3 would be sitting on the floor painting. Occasionally Mrs Smith or one of the other teachers will come in with a message or to see what we are doing. Oh. And there will be some of Mr Fairley’s music playing in the background.
This is all on top of what Room 13 really is. It is an Art Studio which exists as all studios do….to make art works.
In the advertisement for this conference it said that today we will “consider…how to provide support for artists at all stages of their lives”.
That is a problem ladies and gentlemen. Cos until you consider people my age as artists then you can never support us. You can give us what you think we want, or more likely what you think we need, but at best all you provide is patronising praise. Can any of you remember what it was like to be 11 or 12? Think ladies and gentlemen. You knew what was going on, you knew about war and sex, you didn’t believe in Santa and the Tooth Fairy. You could think for yourselves. You occasionally got things wrong because you did not understand something….but even trained adult doctors and scientists do that. Can you remember what it was like for adults to treat you as if you were something slightly different from a human being?
It is horrible.
Let me give you a couple of examples which are very close to my heart and annoy me a lot. When we won the Barbie Prize we were in every paper in the country (except the Daily Telegraph) but we could look up none of the reports on these papers web sites because on the schools internet network they are restricted because they contain News! Some of us have been invited to go to Kathmandu to work with schools there. We can not look up Nepal on the school internet because that is restricted because it contains Travel. We can not check our virtual share portfolios on the FT index web site because that is restricted because it contains financial information. Obviously some one somewhere is telling me what I should know, what I should think and what I should be interested in. I object quite strongly to that. Now ladies and gentlemen, don’t get me wrong…I am not saying that schools should have unfiltered internet access…. I am saying they should look at what they filter because filtering knowledge is not educating.
I know that some adults think that teaching children to think is wrong and that it does not prepare them for the real world where all they will have to do is to do as they are told. I have a horrible suspicion that what they mean by the ‘real world’ is High School!
Some of the greatest works of the last century were made by Picasso. They are beautiful and tell me a lot about what it is like to be an old man but even Picasso could never paint what it is like to be an eleven year old girl. I am NOT comparing myself in any way to Picasso, but I can make art about being an eleven year old girl. Your problem is that you look at it in a different way to the way you look at late Picasso.
This I think is the biggest difference between Room 13 and other ways of working. It teaches us how to think, it treats our ideas, our dreams and thoughts seriously and perhaps even more importantly it allows us to find ways of expressing them.
Many of you will wonder why I am prepared to speak at this conference but would not speak at the conference in the Nevis Centre some weeks ago. I was against that conference because it seemed to me that everybody only became interested in us and our work after we had won the Barbie Prize. Jodie’s work was on show in the West Highland Museum all last summer and nobody was interested. After it was on the front page of the Scotsman and written up by all the other big papers (except the Daily Telegraph) it was a different matter. It upset us that despite all the contacts we had tried to make that nobody in Scotland was really interested in what we are trying to do. I was fed up with the adult world using us for their own purposes. So we dug our heels in and I am grateful to Mr Fairley and Claire for supporting our stance even though I think they thought we were wrong. Now things are slightly different, we have a major partner in NESTA who are interested in what we are doing. They never patronise us and if we are going to work together to make things better we have to find ways of telling you about us properly. This conference seemed a good place to start. It is still a concern that while we are constantly approached by people from all over Europe, people at home are not really interested. We have had over 300 e mails since January asking us about what we are doing only 25 came from Scotland and those included correspondence from our accountant, the West Highland Museum and teachers in our school. The only Scottish visitor we have had is a student from Napier University and yet teachers have travelled from Stockton, Sheffield and to come and talk to us. A group from Brinsworth Comprehensive in Rotherham came up to work with us for several days. I can’t remember any teacher from any of the Lochaber High Schools visiting.
Ladies and gentlemen, without Caol Primary School and Room 13 working together I would never have seen the Matisse/Picasso exhibition, the Eva Hesse exhibition, I might have discovered Barnet Newman as his work is very important to me but I would never have had the chance to see his work for real. I would not even have been allowed into the gallery to see Fiona Banner’s work in the Tate let alone been taken round it by one of the Turner Prize curators… (even secondary school students needed permission...how patronising is that?) I would not have discovered Norman MacCaig or James Joyce.
I would not have discovered myself. Surely… surely that is what education is meant to be?
Danielle Souness, Managing Director of Room 13 Caol 2002/2003