4 of

You are browsing the full text of the article: The Questionnaire on Education. An Analysis

 

 

Click here to go back to the list of articles for Issue: Volume: 2 of Design For Today

 

Design For Today   2   1934  Page: 154
 
 The Questionnaire on Education. An Analysis
Zoom:
 100% 200% Full Size
Brightness:
Contrast:
Saturation:
 
THE QUESTIONNAIRE ON EDUCATION

An Analysis by Margaret H. Bulley

PROLOGUE

Let us imagine a room and its occupant a hundred years hence. The room is well proportioned and richly decorated. The walls are covered with paintings. Ornament plays its part in the structure of the furniture and fittings. Colours are strong and pure. The whole effect, although rich and complex, is nevertheless restful and controlled because fine design conditions the whole. The Guilds of Leisure have done their work well.

The occupant, a young man, is writing a book on education in design in the nineteen-thirties. But his thoughts wander. He runs his hands through his hair. Suddenly he picks up his pad and leaves the room. Perhaps in the older part of the house he will catch the right mood. . . .

He enters the furthest wing, once the original house, and opens the door of his grandfather’s study, preserved by his own father in its original state. It is low but light, with windows and fitted furniture with rounded ends stream-lined along the walls. Steel, though dimmed, gleams faintly metallic. All is reasoned, planned, shipshape. A mechanical precision, an elegant austerity, conditions every object. The dictates of practical necessity alone have determined the position of window, door and fire. The engineers have done their work well. An admirable machine has come to rest. He shudders. How his father can preserve these antiques is beyond comprehension.

He enters a room near by. It also is light and airy but higher and with taller windows. Severity still reigns but the tension is relaxed. A new note has crept in, a touch of humour, a certain grace, humanising the whole. There are pictures. The design of the furniture in certain instances was an innovation in its day. All is harmonious: a line of moulding, a decorative note, is here and there apparent. A patterned rug, a curtain, show freshness and sincerity of experience, admirably reproduced. Artist and manufacturer have come to terms. The new council of 1934 did its work well.

Nevertheless, our spectator is not satisfied. What curtailment of the imaginative life! . . . Only in his own beautiful room can he be content. Back he goes, opens a faded volume and studies once more a report on a questionnaire set in 1934 by a journal devoted to design in industry. From such original sources first hand evidence can be gained. This is what he reads:

THE EVIDENCE 1

Of the total number (comparatively small) who answered the questionnaire 18 per cent, were women. The majority of those answering the questionnaire are under forty, including quite a few in their teens; but this has no great significance, as it is to be feared that the older generation is not so active in filling up forms which are not obligatory. 17 per cent, describe themselves as architects, artists, art students, craftsmen and designers; 15 per cent, as directors, distributors or salesmen; 6 per cent, as engineers or their assistants; 5 per cent, as art teachers, directors or editors; 4 per cent, as house decorators or furnishers; and 3 per cent, as advertisement managers. There were also 2 printers, 1 photographer, 1 window dresser, 1 “theatre,” and 1 “ex-pianist.” Other writers represent a varied assortment of trades and professions which appear to have no special connection with design. They include 7 per cent, (non-art) teachers and a writer who reveals that he is a designing barrister. About 75 per cent, of the writers are town dwellers; 92 per cent, have had some form of secondary education; 25 per cent, have been to universities. As might be expected, all the professional designers have had special training in schools of art or technical schools.

Fifty per cent, of the writers state that they were interested in art on leaving school or before the age of 18, including one who was interested subconsciously as a baby, and another who knew and hated William Morris’s designs at 5. Only 22 per cent, of these writers attribute their interest to encouragement given at school, and of these half are women who were given teaching in connection with embroidery lessons or visits to museums and galleries. One says that her interest was roused “because I had the singular good fortune to be a pupil of Miss Marion Richardson.” Men generally state that their interest was due to the influence of classical and history masters, who discussed design in relation to classical and medieval church architecture. The remainder of those who testify to an early interest generally ascribe it to home or personal influence in the first place, then to travel, books and visits to museums and galleries. Architectural design was almost always the predominant interest, then the design of furniture 2. The design of paintings is mentioned three times in this connection, that of cars and aeroplanes once, handwriting once. Credit is also given to the B.B.C. talks (5 per cent.), to D.I.A. literature and Design for To-day (2 ½ per cent.), to articles in the Architectural Review and Week-end Review (once each), to a visit to Heals’, to the Paris Exhibition of 1925, and to the Dorland Hall Exhibition (once each). One writer states that so little was interest in design encouraged at his school that “detention in our art school was a punishment dished out for ragging.”
The same causes that generally led to interest before 18 usually account for it after that age. Necessities of business and of furnishing one’s own home begin, however, to play a prominent part. “Living among it,” writes one architect, “we had it for breakfast, lunch and

* * *


1 Owing to the vagueness of many replies, absolute accuracy in the following facts and figures cannot be guaranteed. They are believed to be as accurate as circumstances permit after long and detailed analysis.

2 No doubt due to carpentry lessons.
Design For Today   2   1934  Page: 155
 
 The Questionnaire on Education. An Analysis
Zoom:
 100% 200% Full Size
Brightness:
Contrast:
Saturation:
 
dinner.” Another man traces his interest to his history master, who hung the walls of his room with prints after Gaugin; another acknowledges his debt to his art school “where ‘fitness for purpose’ was taught thirty-two years ago.” Four per cent, state that interest was stimulated by pictures, reproductions of old masters, or by the ability to draw and paint; 50 per cent, acknowledge that they were interested in “antiques” before modern design.

Pleasure and pain intermingle, it seems, when interest in design is keen. The bad is so very bad. But pleasure wins and life is enriched. Knowledge of design appears, not unnaturally, to be of practical and commercial value in businesses where good design can play a part. But there are exceptions. “No; public and employers don’t like good designs,” writes one man; while another says that a man with knowledge of design is “suspect by fellow teachers as ‘advanced.’ ”
The varied interpretations put upon the word design are made clear by the answers to the questions that deal with where design is found to be most lacking, where most effective. Design is said to be lacking not only (and most frequently) in the home, in our towns, townplanning, architecture, furnishings, and in the various objects of household use, but “in every phase of life,” “in the minds of most manufacturers,” “in the minds of average people,” “in commerce governed by ancients,” in every phase of “everyday,” “civic” and “social” life, in “economics,” “plumbing,” in “parents and people of the last generation” and “in areas devoted to henruns in most industrial towns.” One writer was led to take an interest in design because of a “realisation of the unplanned chaotic lunacy of the capitalist system.” Others miss design in Christmas cards.

To the question where design is most effective, one replies: “Don’t understand this question: design is suitable and effective everywhere. No one place more or less than another.” Another says: “Design is the only path to doing things without labour and loss of energy.” “On leaving school,” one woman writes, “I thought that ‘design’ would only mean either a horrid tangled geometrical or floral pattern or an artful trick.” Or again: “In the sense in which I mean design I find it equally in ‘antique’ and ‘modern.’ I do not see that modern design differs essentially from any other design. What is good design save fitness for purpose, etc., etc., ad lib.”
Others read a different meaning into the word. One writer says that he finds it “in no class of things as a whole excepting purely functional things, whose fashioning, however, is not design in its fullest sense.” “Without design, which is the basis of all good art, life has no meaning,” says a second. A writer states that his sense of design was probably fostered by “a sense of pattern, which is what I have always appreciated most in literary style.” Another says: “Always interested in design qua design, quite apart from whether its embodiment were old or contemporary”; another finds design most effective in “form in painting”; another speaks of “the study of Bach and Beethoven and the (self) discovery that form is in most things and all arts.” But interpretations of this kind are rare. Only 9 per cent, of the writers approach the question of design in its profounder aspects—design that is largely intuitive; disinterested design; design, in the end, for contemplation; harmony, the spiritual idea. The great majority use the word with reference to tidiness, order, and planning in general, or else with special reference to the broader aspects of design in relation to town-planning, architecture, transport and furnishings. One writer says: “Pictures and painting are too narrow and egotistical a field for the expression of art.”

Different readings of the word, however, lead to the most abrupt contrasts. Design is lacking “in fountain pens,” we read in one paper; “in St. Paul’s” in the next; “in the Parthenon” and “in gas cookers”; “where children are,” remarks a far-sighted one.

Because we are a race of town-dwellers, living in a mechanical age, engineering and transport are continually mentioned, gardens only twice. Design is found most effective in “machinery and articles without tradition and of no social value, ’planes, golf sticks.” In “cars, ’planes, wireless sets and all articles which represent new introductions.” “In things which the user knows as much about as the designer, e.g. commercial motor vehicles—lacking in things which depend on public taste,” writes one penetrating observer. Once only in this connection are painting and pictures mentioned. The London Underground and its posters come in for repeated praise. Electric light fittings are often mentioned. Radio sets, sports equipment, posters, book make-up, textiles, women’s dress, are also singled out. Sometimes modern Swedish and German products are praised, once power stations, once steel windows.

Those who have taken up design as a career usually did so on leaving school or university. Educational or business openings, or else natural aptitude, have shaped their courses. Interest in design in its purer forms is mentioned three times as a deciding cause: “interest in abstract shapes and colours,” in “aesthetics and planning,” in “form in painting.”

Some whose business activities called for knowledge of design regret that this knowledge was lacking. We find a house furnisher tumbled into his job at eighteen in complete ignorance of the subject. Two writers say that they were given teaching on design at school but given it so badly that they would have been better without it. But the general criticism is of the absence of any such teaching.
We have quoted enough. Has the questionnaire served its purpose? Is this small slice of revealed experience cut from a particular section of the public mind of use to those concerned with educational reform, reform in connection with art and industry or, shall we say, industry and design? We believe it offers food for thought, and hope that this journal will shortly have more to say on the subject. We have no doubt that it will be of interest to future historians of public education and public taste.

EPILOGUE

The young man lays down the book. “The Parthenon and gas cookers!” “Fountain pens and St. Paul’s!” He glances round his richly decorated room. He runs his hands through his hair. “Hell!”