Hard Work — Education for Values-based Living
“For millennia humans have made art ... it can’t be unnecessary.”
I was talking to Terri Fidelak, the director of the Art Gallery of Swift Current, about creativity, making, craft and the values of a well-lived life. “Human experience is broad,” she said, “but there are systems pushing to numb our interconnection.” Our conversation had started out simply enough, but very quickly we reached into serious depths as we shifted from what was being made to how and why. The what of craft — the remarkable objects themselves — is personal and limitless and in one sense it’s all that matters, but the how and the why are where we begin to recognize the fundamental power of making. But before we get to craft’s saving the world, we need to consider how craft gets into our world.
Education is where craft starts. Education can come, like craft, in so many forms — learning from people directly and indirectly, formal apprenticeships, casual classes, accidental accrual and self-exploration, from YouTube and TikTok, and, what I need to talk about here, from formal institutional settings. The history of “craft,” defined by individual material creativity seeking to balance human life with the realities of an industrialized world, is also a history of the teaching of craft in schools. Professional training bears with it a specific kind of awareness and responsibility within the hegemonic societal context we have found ourselves in.
Of course I should differentiate between various meanings of craft and education, but others have done that better already. Craft here is a privileged form of making that focuses on the slightly narrow band of creativity found in contemporary Canada that is defined by use and beauty in ratio to each other in infinite variety and manifestation. Globally, culturally, and historically speaking, that definition excludes more craft than it includes, but for now let’s just talk about formal craft education in Canadian post-secondary institutions.
Craft learns by doing and as Linda Sormin, ceramist and studio art professor at New York University, says, “it’s vital to have a place of experimentation that is based on more than what we think or surmise.” The studio as an educational environment is crucial for when it’s “time to go beyond what we think and actually make things material.” School provides a place for developing makers to dream within parameters. “When structured experimentation is encouraged in a context of thousands of years of traditions, the mixing of practice and history, then the values we hold as a civilization make their way into our objects.” The classroom-studio is where pure fantastic imagination is embodied with strict rules and limits of the material whilst, as Sormin says, “connecting with and being in constant communication with the tradition.” In a craft classroom you are right in it, from the start. Students breathe their teachers’ experiences, reflect on the specifics of the skills and materials being shared and then begin their own process — these are the sanctuaries of craft instruction.
Throughout Brigitte Clavette’s career at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design, she came to understand these often hidden, underlying needs of students: “they have questions — they may not know [how to articulate] the question, but they know that what they’ve been doing hasn’t been working.” This includes why they’re there — and then, quite quickly, hands-on technical mentoring generates amazing results through repetition, problem-solving, and practice. With three- and even five- and six-hour classes in the studio “there’s an immediate seriousness. Students dig in, working and solving problems all day. It’s less pressure, more intensity.”
Craft requires and nurtures an experience in the phenomena of material change. As Terri Fidelak says, “it’s a rediscovering or a reinventing of the relationship between the human body and [the] making of things. Hands and bodies connecting to our material world.” And all this needs time and space. Textile artist Katherine Soucie, who is just finishing a mid-career studio-based PhD, concurs. She has taught within apprenticeships and in bachelor’s and master’s programs — teaching within that creative space to explore “the relationship between human scale and manufacturing; between labour and consumption.” The institutional umbrella that protects this incubator cannot be over-appreciated: failure is expensive, trial and error is expensive, but both open the ground for the best of what can be made of human creativity applied to material. This is of course also true in a chemistry lab and an engineer’s workshop, yet somehow we find ourselves having to explain its merit for a craft studio. Part of the problem of course is a hierarchy increasingly expressed by money. Chemistry and engineering are complex and creative too but they create more public and private support funding for school administrations than craft, with the presumption that their graduates can earn more than craft graduates. Not everyone strives for university or theory-heavy conceptualization, and creativity loses if all we consider are the downward pressures of cost structure and revenue streams. Studios educate a different network of human creative thinking, an area that gives the impression as having less value in the current marketplace. Further, craft studios have the flexibility to support different learning styles and needs. Craft can provide a range of practical options for less aggressive forms of career development, where values are measured differently.
There are many other values. Gord Thompson, Craft and Design program director at Sheridan College, speaks of the “revolutionary joy of students experiencing the intensity and sociability of studio-based education.” To know glazes, to care about rabbet joints, to love madder — craft students love their classes — not always, not all of them, but even at 9 a.m. (and 9 p.m.) a studio has high energy; students confabulate and vibrate — they want more. “This is the heart of it,” Thompson emphasizes. “It’s joyful — a personal joy and a collective joy.” Doesn’t it say something good about a society if, when it discovers joy, it nurtures and empowers it? Human beings are not simply narrowed producer pods to be inserted and extracted from a financialized process beyond our control. We are creative and powerful. As Terri Fidelak insists, “This is our humanity we’re talking about! Failure to fund and fuel craft education is a failure to recognize humanity.”
Julie Hollenbach, Craft Chair at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, wrestles with this with her students: “What is it to be teaching in a time like this? How do we come to our classrooms every day when there is such destruction and devastation everywhere?” The answer is clear: “The students know that it is fundamental to their and our humanity.” The conversation with the students, even as they are learning specific skills and about their broader creative culture, is fundamentally about ethics: “What are your, and our, values?” The lessons Hollenbach teaches and learns with her students are foundational: “Craft practice is ethical production ... it requires an embodied experience of the politics and ethics of the material.” At any of the points of concern shaping our world today, craft has tools for navigating the reality we are making. Hollenbach spells it out: “Everyone is a participant — there is no option out. You only choose to participate poorly or well — and craft helps you understand values.”
So why are there cuts to craft education? Everywhere craft schools could be fostering this intoxicating, heady, far-from-perfect, complex, joyful human education. We could all learn from craft how to work on processes to make life enjoyable for more of us ... and yet cuts to craft education are slamming on our brakes, significantly compressing programs, destroying them altogether, limiting travel and professional development for students and instructors.
All because of money of course. Canadian students’ tuition shouldn’t go up if affordable education is meant for everyone. So where do institutions get their money? Part of the solution, eagerly agreed to by institutions and the government, relied on increased tuition from international students. But then in early 2024 that line of revenue was dramatically cut. Now what? Of course administrators and the governing boards were suddenly addressing the decimation of their complex business models that ensure stability and growth over coming quarters and years. The bigger issue for us is the assumption that the only way to run an academic institution in a cost-managed fashion is to run it “like a business,” which is to say: run a profit in order to fund constant unattainable growth. But even in this suspiciously simplified economic version of educational management, why are craft programs being strategically shrunk and shuttered?
A golden age of craft and creative material engagement is surely upon us. Look at the success of Etsy and high-audience craft retail like the One of a Kind show, backed by the enduring draw of sophisticated gallery exhibitions on the one side and handmade personal gifts on the other, all evidence that there is a demand for craft. Craft is a golden commodity in TV-land too: there’s the Great Pottery Throwdown — a British ceramic version of the baking show — with a Canadian-specific version hosted by Hollywood darling Seth Rogen; and Blown Away, the competitive glass-making show with four seasons and a Christmas special. Not to mention the continuing use of “craft” as a moniker for personality and individual value commandeered by luxury brands. And these are only the most obvious examples. Craft education (like English literature and Indigenous Studies and Black Studies and philosophy) is being undermined.
The issue is presented as funding. But it is also ideological. Critiques of higher education sometimes contemptuously refer to academia’s “lofty purposes.” When you can’t draw straight lines between money spent and subsequent money earned, then efficient business models can’t rationalize the spending. But business-like doesn’t have to mean “like a business.” After all, lofty purposes are education’s business.
A major part of the problem is that craft’s revenue — either the community/cultural revenue or the actual cash being made — isn’t immediately tangible and doesn’t help the colleges and universities to pay their bills. It’s great that craft adds cultural meaning and measurable income to society, but that doesn’t keep the college’s lights on.
To match cultural and societal needs from education, then we’re going to have to talk about the role of government in funding education. At some point we’re going to have to talk about taxes. Politicians control the development of the only serious line of revenue for any post-secondary education field that lacks appeal to private financial support partnerships. The people who elect them — us! — are responsible for the world they make. As Gord Thompson points out, education funding in Canada is federal and provincial. In recent elections, at the federal level and at the provincial, at least in Ontario, “we didn’t talk about post-secondary education funding when voting: everyone is culpable.” There has to be a serious and sincere discussion about why voters feel the way they do about taxes and if they really do feel that way. If we don’t fund education and have the courage to say we need to pay for education, then the values we are discussing will begin to collapse.
In a recent opinion piece in the Globe and Mail, philosopher and teacher Mark Kingwell was pointing out the short-sightedness of handing thinking and literacy to AI. In the process, he pointed out that the reasons and results of higher education are not immediately obvious — not to the individual students, not to administrators and certainly not to society. He was talking about philosophy classes but I think the same can be said about craft programs: they’re about “the value of self-given meaning and purpose, the pleasure of being good at hard things for their sake alone, a consuming joy in the free play of imagination.” In craft this means students having the time and support to find those meanings and purposes and to learn how to make the challenge the enjoyment. Craft is a citadel of value-adding friction in an efficiency-driven world in which production is streamlined right down to the ground and industry brackets utility with cost margins.
Craft education has known since the beginning about taking the longer route, enjoying the challenge of “being good at hard things,” as Kingwell puts it. If there’s a singular root of crisis in our world today, it’s that the material realities of all existence and the material scale of human beings have been sped up, abstracted, dematerialized. This is why the question of craft education is also the question of everyone and everywhere: What do we value? What matters? What matter do we value?
“This is hard work,” says Nathan Clarke, one of the principals of Coolican and Company and a student I worked with at Sheridan College. Founded in 2015, the company is now beginning to get into a place where they can balance the generative tensions of idea and reality — “to be able to support your family and staff ... to have a company big enough to make a bigger-louder public statement in society and in business.” Craft education has come a long way in teaching business practices and engaging production techniques without sacrificing principles, “but it’s so difficult to communicate the actual lived experience of bills, pressures, creativity constantly under negotiation.” Being able to see the meaningful and rewarding values whilst navigating the competing interests is an intense challenge. But, Clarke says, “craft education is the place to embody the meaning of the search beyond. The education is not necessarily about learning the skill, but about learning to learn, to maintain the critical edge, not taking skills or experience for granted.” Formal education “expands your imagination to things you’d never even known to think about” and in the process asks what more can be done, “what more can be done both in meaning and in making money.”
Certainly craft education is not for everybody. Our society is made with oncologists and lawyers and hedge fund managers. But all these other people need craft — not only to beautify and Instagram-ify their lives, but because the core values of craft are the core human values that those others parts of our world need: human scale, a profound connection to, and respect for, the phenomenological reality of material, the charting of the journey between idea and material. Society continues to be physical, no matter how abstract it becomes; craft education keeps that path clear and navigable. Where human beings are only workers, they are narrowed, squeezed, reduced to interchangeable units. If human beings are creative, they are empowered embodiments and generators of fantastic value. As Julie Hollenbach says, “Less talk, more do! Craft shows us how to move away from speech acts and move towards act-acts — less idea, more making. This is value-based living” and it applies to every discipline.
Craft has a long and rich belief in itself as an interrupter of flattening systems and dehumanizing financial motivations. This is the phenomena of lived reality Linda Sormin spoke of, beyond thinking, making, and the community of craft culture Gord Thompson spoke of. And it requires the space for organized freedom and reflection that Katherine Soucie and Brigitte Clavette spoke of. It’s what Terri Fidelak meant about the “systems pushing to numb us of our interconnection — part of a story that there’s not enough to go around.” Craft education remains a site to push back, in a constructive and socially engaged, tradition-bound way of progress and optimism. “It’s infectious to be able to dream — to see the products of dreaming.” This capacity for imagination-materialized is what makes craft education not only crucial to the people who will make good of it, but also as a beacon, an edifice and sanctuary of living human value.
The author thanks all the contributors for their ongoing conversation and their time in August and September 2025 specifically for this article.
This article is from the Spring/Summer 2026 issue of Studio Magazine.
