we don’t owe you practical skills.

Here’s an interesting article from the New York Times the other day; you toddle along and pretend to read it and I’ll wait here for you.

So basically, it turned on a light bulb over my head about a lot of what really burns my ass about design education: many design programs are completely out of step with what it actually means to be a designer. I can’t tell you how many designers I know who are either self-employed or own their own companies, and yet never have I once heard anything about a design program offering any business education at all. For the most part, they’re run like extensions of art programs, teaching mostly visual skills, maybe a little advertising too if you look hard enough. if this article’s any indication, these programs don’t think they should be teaching real-world skills. Like, you know, budgeting. Billing. Getting employees with non-normative sleep schedules into a normal schedule. Things every designer over the age of 25 has to deal with.

There’s one sentence in that piece at the NYT which echoed almost completely what I was really wondering about design education:

Part of universities’ function is to keep alive man’s greatest creations, passing them from generation to generation.

The article essentially boils down to an assertion that universities’ importance lies in offering a student instruction on critical thinking, not practical knowledge.

Okay, I’ll buy that, I suppose. But, if university’s a way to learn how to think, who guides a student through the practical application of that learned critical awareness?

I mean, the things I need to do every day as an independent designer—learning how to read a client who’s on the fence about a new piece, structuring my assets so that all my eggs aren’t in one basket—who’s teaching students these common sense things of how to live as an artisan? Who’s teaching them that as the posessor of a basic and somewhat rare human skill that it could be in their interest to incorporate and protect everything they sell rather than working for someone else? I certainly don’t remember being handed any practically applied information like that at all, which resulted in an amazing loss of money and in some cases, being utterly taken for a ride by employers. I remember lots of color theory and endless hours of critique, but not one single seminar on how to get paid.

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