Every Thursday I go see the Penny Stamps lecture series at the Michigan Theatre – partially because attendance is mandatory for all Art & Design students, but also because it’s really great and the only lecture of its kind in all the land, and these terrestrial creatives come talk to all us college asteroids floating aimlessly aspiring to their level of planetary gravity, and they say grand inspirational moving things and remind us that BFAs aren’t useless after all. It’s a shame that most of the people there would rather be somewhere else, hence all the little glowing rectangles that can be seen glittering in the sea of chairs, mostly the back seats, where thumbs are twiddled and absent minds discuss social media in undertones and the rebels huff and scoff and always find imaginary or otherwise flaws in the person on stage even if they radiate with the intensity of a hundred suns. It’s a shame that the only reason people don’t want to go is because they’re forced to go, but what can ya do.
This particular Thursday’s speaker was Sanjit ‘Bunker’ Roy who founded the Barefoot College in Tilonia, India, which among other things teaches illiterate grandmothers in Africa to be solar engineers and pass on this knowledge to their villages and show everyone how to be sustainable and generate light from the sun and not just wood and gas – grandmothers because they say males have a tendency to head out to big cities and leave families once they’ve got diplomas – grandmothers, however, are dedicated to the childrens, neighbors, friends, farmers, tradesmen all of whom could really use more better light. The college only accepts students who don’t have a degree or diploma of any kind, favoring instead the hands-on knowledge of experience, competence, and confidence. The reasoning for this is to protect and enhance traditions and practices that have been used for generations, resulting in specialized skill sets that can now be shared across cultures and spaces. When the grandmothers return from their crash course, which lasts about six months, they become the teachers and soon enough every hut has it’s own little glowing piece of sun and they don’t have to burn so much and life generally becomes at least a little easier.
I think this idea of teaching only with the hands and no books or exams or theories is one with great potential, one that makes me think of guilds back in the day, of passing on a different kind of knowledge than academic proficiency, tacit knowledge, skill trades, how to do things and change life and not just talk about it like stuff’s gonna happen on its own. Of course, in an ideal world everyone can read and write, but this kind of education has the ability to transcend the invisible barriers of language and culture that conceptual education has constructed. The ability to make things with one’s own hands seems to be overlooked these days, what with so much of the open space for innovation existing in the digital universe. I vision a future where these kinds of experience-based institutions could work together with the academic centers based on theory over practice, every university consisting of two halves, one for books and one for hands. I see a time when we can admit that we all have something to teach each other, always something new to learn, things that can’t be taught in a book or on the computer. After all, there are hundreds of grandmothers all over Africa that can now build solar lamps, which is something I can’t say I could do with four fifths of an undergraduate degree under my belt. Could you?
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