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Were you to enter my bedroom in the late 1990s, when I was still in high school, youd

find a curious drawing tacked to my wall directly above the computer. The drawing was

exquisitely executed: an architectural elevation depicting a fanciful, neoclassical library of soaring

height and heroic proportion. Glittering winged sculptures perpetually lifting off of its glad white

domes. Whos dream was that?,you might have wondered. My answer would have been difficult if

not impossible to anticipate, for the guilty party was Frank Lloyd Wright. Yes, before his

personality came to total expression he had been churning out designs of typical 19th-century

grecophilia. I placed the drawing there deliberately, as a reminder that nothing new arrives fully-

formed. It was my personal creative block anti-freeze.

Asked to select an emblem for my newly-shaped Art Education philosophy, I would have

to go with the disastrous (and disastrously ugly) Edsel, by Ford. This confused mess was a product

of criticism gone hyper mutual design by committee after the discriminating lan vital of Henry

Ford, Sr., had departed the company and the earth. The headless beast stumbled and nearly died

until a new head was screwed on.

Id wear the Edsels obscene grille as a badge of dont listen to the critics. As a reminder that

criticism is the mother of compromise. As further proof Id put up a gallery of whichever examples

struck me that week the great works that so often, in memory, are indissoluble from the

personalities of their authors. A fact underscored by the simple evocative power of their names:

Eiffel. Picasso. Rodin. Wright.

Put simply, my Art Education philosophy is two circles one inside another. The outer

circle is a broad insistence upon Art as integral to Education, a view of these two incorrectly

separate things as synonymous and fully interdependent. The second, more focused circle is art by

tools not opinion. In other words, make available the tools and skills necessary to take a students

art-thoughts from the mind into physical reality, but never opine that there is any correct or

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accepted manner of expression. Teach what students are curious to learn. Offer comment and

collaborative opinion solely when sought. Omit critiques entirely. Rid the seedbed of

obstructions*.

Kiel, youre critiquing critique! is an oversimplification. I am protesting its eminence in

art (and architecture) education. Education, and especially its truer form, Art Education, should be

about possibilities, not limits.

Schools would transform radically under my philosophy built from student-specific

tutelage. There would be no more one-way blanket education to audiences of thirty and upwards.

Instead, singular attention would be given on an interest-tailored, collaborative basis. The model

would move closer to that of Mentor and Apprentice, by any measure the most successful Art

Educational system humans have yet devised.

We are denied a tremendous leap forward by current institutional norms, not necessarily

out of malice, but simply because, It is easier to destroy than to create. Im offering a Rule, at

least as old, that asks of us more:

DO UNTO OTHERS AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM DO UNTO YOU.

* Ive attached an illuminating bit of evidence. It is the original Bauhaus curriculum, circa 1919, translated

from the German. Note which word which practice is conspicuously absent.