Curation vs. education

Practically all public art Galleries have some kind of “education” or “engagement” arm to them, specifically focussing on how to engage (for the most part) children and young people in their organisation and how to supplement their school education through more creative and multidisciplinary means. These may take the form of workshops, gallery tours, community projects, etc., Those members of staff who facilitate this are often entitled ‘Gallery Educator’ or similar, and can talk to organisations such as engage, Cultural Learning Alliance, or Artscape, meeting up in focus groups and conferences, all Gallery Educators together, to discuss how important the Arts are in education, how imperative education is within the Arts, and how best to splice the two together.

However, I’m not sure if we haven’t all got our thinking a little skewed on the matter. There seems to be a gap between The Gallery and The Educator, between curation and education; the two rarely sit completely side by side. First, the ‘curators’ (usually male) direct the show and say what goes where, and then the ‘educators’ (usually female) plan how best to translate this to engage their target ‘outreach’ audience. If we look at the Tate for example, they have an extensive educative department in place with a whole ream of resources for gallery educators nation-wide. It even goes under a different tab on the webpage with its own title: ‘Learn Online’. But it is still a separate space, an optional added extra. When you visit, you can just look or you can pick up an ‘activity’ sheet to entertain the nippers. The two are never entirely cohesive.

As far as I understand it, curating is a form of educating in itself – you are drawing a narrative with images, be it chronologically, aesthetically or more literally. So why is there such dichotomy between the two? Why do we need all these organisations whose sole reason is Arts Education? Art is education; what are we doing when we create if not trying to learn something about the world and share that learning with others? Thus, in our houses of art the two should be entirely congruent, inherent within each other, not a bolt-on initiative to tick a box on a fundraising application.