Neville Brody, in the “President’s Perspective” foreword to D&AD 2013:
There is a pressing urgency to address education for the survival, growth, and global success of the creative industries. Britain, for example, is a nation of inventors, and we have successfully convinced the government of our engineering prowess with the ability to cut across boundaries. What is critical in the U.K. now is to break down the barrier between creative thinking and engineering thinking. But our current geo-industrial landscape means sectors of the country have been disadvantaged by government policy with regard to broader creative education.
In an age of widening inequality, our duty is to ensure access for everyone to the opportunity of creative education and not just the so-called STEM subjects of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. It is the duty of governments to take the creative industries and creativity seriously.
This is a political situation. Many nations have the resources to support creative education, but it depends whether or not their governments are prepared to allocate them. Because creativity isn’t quantifiable, it loses out (as it’s doing in the U.K.), yet some of our greatest cultural treasures have been vilified at the point of launch. We wouldn’t have had David Bowie at London’s V&A Museum – or the Beatles – if not for art schools.
The British government is obsessed with a Victorian model of society that is mechanistic. But the modern world is hybridi[z]ed. It’s about crossing boundaries through people bent on changing society. It shouldn’t be about having to choose, but about everyone having access to some form of creative learning. […]
I have based the School of Communication at the Royal College of Art on… providing a rigorous foundation coupled with deprogramming graduate students to create a culture of lateral and critical thinking…. [O]pen-source learning [as in MOOCs] doesn’t work for creative education, which involves making and working in teams.