The School of ______
Beneficial Outcomes

Adam Sutherland, Director Grizedale Arts, 2016

My own education encompassed all three systems in use in the UK in the post war period. Initially I attended a public school and underwent the formal character building regime of distance and discipline, I have found both useful in my life. Subsequently I attended a free school where I adjusted to the self determination ethic and the freedom to pursue personal interests, be those drugs or pottery and I have found that to equally be useful in my life. Finally I attended a state comprehensive school and experienced the miasmal mist of half knowledge and uncertainty developing a determination that it is only through individual vision that value can be extracted from the everyday.

Throughout this education process I always found energy and dynamism in the creative process (in particular making things), it enabled me to escape and to reinterpret these systems creating values and solutions, a strategy I continue to use in my life and work and a mode of reaction that I try to impart to others, an ambition to make things work no matter how difficult the circumstances. For my life experience an education system, like a political system or a family is something imposed on you that you work with to achieve the most beneficial outcomes for others and in relation to them yourself.