‘“We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and “success,” defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.” ? Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
On the other hand if you’re paying £9000 a year to an institution that isn’t working its ass off to challenge and inspire you, let the world know (so that they up their game), and then take your money elsewhere.
I’m no longer surprised to discover that so often the photographers that I admire the most — young and old — have degrees in something other than photography or art. History, anthropology, literature, natural sciences come to mind instantly.
Are photography degrees useless? Walter Benjamin said way back in the 1930s that illiteracy will be defined as an ignorance not of writing, but of photography. A precient statement of the commodified and spectacular nature of modern discourse that privileges the visual over other sensual stimuli.
Photography, or more generally all the electro/chemical/mechanical processes of producing and reproducing imagery, is such a ubiquitious aspect of modernity most outside of the photographic world ignore it, taking it as a somehow natural and unmediated reflection of reality. As any half decent photographer knows photography has a far more complex relationship with any concept of the ‘real’ and a good photographic education should explore these complexities to promote a wider visual literacy. Few ever question the study of English, the study of Maths, or even the study of Art (with a capital A) why therefore is the study of photography so denegrated? A rhetorical question that has many answers – the academic bias against craft, the classical Platonic suspicion of the visual; all out of tune with the photographic and filmic age we inhabit.
Saying that I do agree: if a photography course charges £9K and doesn’t really engage with a wider visual literacy it is not worth the money.
Q: Name a country that starts with the letter U (asked in the US).
A: …. Europe!?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/02/lunch-scholars-video-reveals-students-cant-answer-basic-trivia_n_1250023.html