Page 127 - Constructing Craft

believed that class inequalities were not imposed on the population by the

education system, but were ‘achieved by what is tacitly presupposed by the
teaching’ and for that to work the type of pedagogy employed had to ‘be accepted
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by all concerned as legitimate’. Throughout the following chapters this principle is
related to craft education and craft marketing – another area where one group could

exert unconscious control over another. Education influenced the surge of interest
in crafts after the Second World War and craft education changed from being taught

at school as a means of stimulating children’s creativity through to education at the

adult level for the growing number of people interested in craft and, after the
commercial potential of craft was realised, more qualification-centred education

designed to create ‘professionals’. Craftspeople also actively promoted and sold

their work and the means they used to do this was influenced by individuals who
wanted craft to imitate the conventions of the art world. How and where work was

displayed and sold assigned new meanings to the terms ‘amateur’ and
‘professional’. The role of the Crafts Council also showed how a hierarchical

relationship between amateurs and professionals evolved as the politicisation of the
craft movement increased. Later in the book we will look at the rise and fall of the

CCNZ as an example of the way in which tensions increased between those who

considered themselves craftspeople in the traditional sense and those who became
involved in the widening interpretation of craftspeople as professionals, as

individuals and craft organisations sought to have craft raised to higher social,
political and cultural levels.

Constructing Craft