The power to create…

For OCA’s first graduation lunch, we chose the Royal Society of the Arts (RSA). We invited all the students graduating this year to join us for an informal lunch with family members and friends. The RSA is a short walk away from the Royal Festival Hall, where the University for the Creative Arts holds its graduation ceremony each year.
In the vaults of the building designed by the Adam brothers and which has been the home of the RSA since 1774, students and tutors had the chance to meet face-to-face, look at the work of graduating students and mark the conclusion of one chapter of their creative journey.

It’s hard to imagine a more fitting place than the RSA (to give it its full name, The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) to celebrate the creative and academic achievements of this year’s graduates. Established 260 years ago to enrich society through ideas and action, the RSA believes that everyone has the ‘power to create’.
‘We all have creative capacities that, when understood and supported, can be mobilised to bring about a flourishing society, and more fulfilled lives’, says the RSA. The creative journey all OCA students take is testimony to that belief.
Like the RSA, OCA’s founder Michael Young believed that everyone has the ‘power to create’. It was such an important idea for him that he set up the Open College of the Arts in 1987 so that everyone could have the chance to study the creative arts, no matter what their qualifications, their previous experience as creative practitioners, and their age and circumstances.
2015 is not only the year of OCA’s first graduation lunch, but also the centenary year of the birth of OCA’s founder, Michael Young. The Open University, the University of the Third Age, the National Extension College, The Open College of the Arts: all of them offer approaches to education beyond the age of compulsory schooling, inspired by his vision that we find our humanity in the continuing quest for knowledge and understanding.

The value of a creative arts education is once again being vigorously debated, as it was when the RSA was established. Helen Hall, Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, makes the case in her 2013 book The Value of the Humanities. Based on a series of six lectures she gave at the University of Oxford in 2013, she puts forward five arguments in language that resonated during our time together at the RSA.
First, the humanities study the meaning and making practices of our culture. Second, they are useful to society by putting pressure on how governments commonly understand use, in particular economic usefulness and the means of measuring it. Third, they make a contribution to our individual and collective happiness. Fourth is what she describes as ‘the politically ambitious’ argument that democracy needs the humanities. Lastly, they are a good in themselves.
We hope the short walk we made to the south bank of the Thames after lunch was the beginning of a much longer journey for this year’s OCA graduates: one of the mind and of the imagination as they continue to develop their creative practice.