Page 142 - Constructing Craft

In my submissions I am not limiting the word “skill” to “general
mechanical intelligence” … Skill has a wider and more valuable
meaning. In the sense that I am using it, skill means
creativeness as well as precision. … In many ways the skills
required in the future are the skills of the old craftsmen – skills
that involve a high degree of originality, versatility and
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precision.

Sutch was writing of skills in a most general sense, but appears to recognise the
way that New Zealanders had been educated over the previous twenty years.

Sutch’s advocacy, although welcome, could not dispel some concerns that the

expressive approach to the learning of skills, while possibly suitable for children,
may not have been the most appropriate way for future professional craftspeople to

learn their discipline. As Peter and Dianne Beatson noted:
Spontaneity and ease of self-expression emerge at the end not
the start of a long process of training. Apprentice artists [and
craftspeople] must accept with humility the task of playing the
sedulous ape to others until, after much trial and error, they
develop their own speaking voice. The capacity to create art is
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acquired, it is not given by nature or divine inspiration.

This placed both artists and craftspeople somewhere between the freedom that was

promoted in some primary classrooms and the rigid apprenticeship programme that
operated in many trades. What was needed was a clear plan for the development of

formal qualifications that built on an economic base that the largely self-taught
craftspeople had established. But others were more concerned with training that

developed conceptual skills. This was a plan to educate craftspeople so that they

might become the designers of objects rather than the makers – craft artists rather
than craft tradesmen or women.

Constructing Craft