Page 141 - Constructing Craft

training at the post-secondary school level was taking place in community education

classes, craft clubs or courses at teachers’ colleges and polytechnics where
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instructors were often only just one step ahead of their students. However, by the
mid-1970s it was clear that the studio craft movement was not a fleeting
phenomenon and interest grew in the education of both practising and future

craftspeople.

The informal nature of education at the adult level was a problem for the middle-

class people that dominated the movement. While many craftspeople were able to
take on a professional status as a result of their ability to sell their work, they valued

the cultural and symbolic capital that formal qualifications afforded professions, and

craft lacked. The increasing emphasis on professionalism was evident in Craft New
Zealand and talk about education and specialist training became a regular topic in
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the magazine. The question was: what form should the training take? Should
craftspeople head down the traditional path of craft skill-training in workshops or

would professionalism demand a more formal academic education in universities or
polytechnics? A generation that had been part of the new primary school art and

craft curriculum would be less inclined to unquestioningly accept that the only way

to learn craft was through a trades-based training programme, although the
distinction between trades-type training and craft education remained blurred.

Craft and the Economy

In the 1950s and 1960s the relationship between developing craft skills and the role

of studio craft in the economy appeared confused. The ideas of educators such as
Beeby had infiltrated the thinking of influential New Zealanders outside the

education system, and some of them believed they could see an economic benefit
emerging from the new education system ‒ craft was a part of that thinking. The

economist, Dr William Sutch, who believed that New Zealand needed to widen its

economic base, made a submission to the 1961 Commission on Education in New
Zealand in which he asserted that changes in primary education could have a

positive impact on the economy. In the report he advocated a broader-based
definition of the word ‘skill’.

Constructing Craft