Convenience Big Store: Bring back art schools for creative “layabouts”

2 September, 2021

In the headlines

Dominic Raab has flown to Qatar for talks with its emir about rescuing thousands more Afghans. The Foreign Secretary was grilled yesterday by a select committee on the fall of Afghanistan, but they "barely left a dent", says Quentin Letts in The Times. The US Supreme Court has refused to block a law banning abortions after six weeks in Texas, after a 5-4 ruling last night. "Reproductive rights are human rights," tweeted Hillary Clinton. "We'll fight for them." Abba are back. The Swedish group will make a "historic" announcement at 5.45pm today. Fans are certain it's new music, but the band have stayed tight-lipped.

Comment of the day

From left, John Lennon, Pete Townshend, David Bowie and Charlie Watts

Bring back art schools for creative "layabouts"

What did the late Rolling Stone Charlie Watts have in common with John Lennon, David Bowie, Pete Townshend, Ray Davies and many other great rockers of the 1960s and 1970s? They were all lucky enough to go to art schools that "subsidised messers, dreamers and misfits", says Fintan O'Toole in The Irish Times. Entry requirements were minimal and the National Diploma in Design was known by students as the "Nothing Doing Diploma". Keith Richards, a "yob" who ended up in art school, once said: "It's somewhere they put you if they can't put you anywhere else." Students were "pampered layabouts" given generous grants and cheap housing. Yet these asylums for misfits produced musicians who are loved the world over, doing more for Britain's international standing half a century ago "than the entire Foreign Office".

Postwar art schools came from two now unfashionable political ideas. First, that bad boys and girls "temperamentally allergic" to traditional universities had a right to further education. Second, that it was worth giving young people a chance and not fretting "about trying to control what they're doing". This was all lost in the 1980s, when bigger institutions gobbled up the art schools amid the mania for measuring inputs and outcomes. That's a shame, because it's "useless non-conformists" who give us new art and new ideas. Where in Britain's education system will "happy accidents" like Charlie Watts find a home now?

The new Puritans are scourging America

A "new Puritanism" is sweeping the West, says Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic. In America it's possible to meet people who have lost everything – jobs, money, friends, colleagues – "after violating no laws, and sometimes no workplace rules". Instead they have broken (or are accused of having broken) social codes on race, sex, personal behaviour, even acceptable humour. "The phone stops ringing. People stop talking to you. You become toxic." Some say it's not serious, but isolation, public shaming and loss of income are severe sanctions for adults, with long-term personal and psychological repercussions. One "difficult" academic I interviewed contemplated suicide.

Just as "odd old women" were once accused of witchcraft, certain types of people are now likely "to fall victim to modern mob justice". They are, or were, professors who liked to chat or drink with their students, bosses who went out to lunch with their staff, people who blurred the lines between social life and institutional life. More often than not apologies are parsed, examined for "sincerity" – and rejected. "The censoriousness, the shunning, the ritualised apologies, the public sacrifices – these are typical behaviours in illiberal societies with rigid cultural codes." On examination, the accusers are people who disliked their target, or held some kind of personal or professional grudge. If we drive away the difficult people, we will become a flatter, duller, less interesting society. And history, in the end, will expose us.

Zeitgeist

A former student from Lincoln has been ordered to read Dickens, Austen, Shakespeare and Hardy as part of a sentence for downloading white-supremacist literature and bomb-making instructions. The judge told Ben John, 21, that he had avoided imprisonment "by the skin of his teeth". He recommended starting with A Tale of Two Cities and Pride and Prejudice, and told John to return in January, saying: "You will tell me what you have read and I will test you... if I think you are [lying to] me, you will suffer."

Gone viral

A teenager from Maharashtra, central India, has become the fastest person to "limbo-skate" under 10 bars, says Indian newspaper The Hitavada. Science student Shrishti Dharmendra Sharma, 17, completed the flexible feat in just 1.694 seconds. But she's not the only limbo skater in town, says Guinness World Records. In 2015 a 12-year-old from China, Li Mingfen, broke the record for the fastest time to limbo-skate under 20 cars – it took her 14.15 seconds.

Tomorrow's world

Scientists are growing a new strain of wheat in Hertfordshire to make healthier toast. The government-approved programme uses an experimental gene-editing tool called Crispr to block wheat cells from producing an amino acid thought to cause cancer, especially when bread is toasted. Boffins in China and the US have invested heavily in Crispr tech, but strict EU rules on GM foods have slowed research. The UK is using its post-Brexit freedom to push ahead.

Snapshot

On the money

Phoebe Waller-Bridge has gone "from Fleabag to moneybags", says Juliet Conway in the Daily Mail, after Companies House records showed the 36-year-old west Londoner has earned more than £22m in the past two years. "Keen to enjoy the fruits of her labour", the creator of Killing Eve splashed out on a £5.2m Victorian house in the capital, with a gym, a large bar and a black and marble kitchen.

Snapshot answer

It's Princess Leonor of Spain on her first day at boarding school in south Wales. The 15-year-old heir to the Spanish throne is starting sixth form at UWC Atlantic – a 12th-century castle on the coast west of Cardiff that's a big hit with European royalty. Princess Alexia, second in line to the Dutch throne, is also a pupil, and Crown Princess Elisabeth of Belgium left this summer. The £33,500 a year establishment is known as "Hogwarts for hippies" – subjects include Tibetan literature and the theory of knowledge.