Bildung in the ’burbs: Education for the suburban nation

‘The experimental development of an unexciting region’

McGregor was not alone in capturing the suburbs for this program. Similar themes can be found in Hugh Stretton’s Ideas for Australian Cities (1970) and Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country (1964). At a policy level, they informed the Whitlam government’s Department of Urban and Regional Development (DURD) under Tom Uren, and also the suburban expansion of Australian universities (see Uren, 1975). In his history of Monash University, Graeme Davison (2010) points out that it was expected in the plans for the Clayton campus, 18 km south-east of Melbourne, that the newly appointed professors would live nearby on the expanding eastern fringe of the city – an expectation which, in the early days, was largely fulfilled. In the vision of the late 1950s, Monash was to be a modern, innovative institution and it was possible to think of suburban Clayton as intellectually exciting, a frontier on which such innovation might occur.

There has, of course, always been the opposing view. In literary and intellectual circles, Humphries’ satire was perhaps more representative even of the 1960s. It resonates, for example, with the ‘Godzone’ debate in Meanjin in the late 1960s, in which journalist and broadcaster Allan Ashbolt famously decried the self-satisfied materialism of ‘the Australian man of today – on Sunday morning in the suburbs’:

He is a sentient being, but hardly rational or purposeful.… His world is mass-produced and mass-manipulated, outside his own control. He is mortgaged to a full belly, to the petty pleasures of gadgetry, to second-hand sensations, to the dreams and nightmares which ‘they’ impose upon him. They give him a job and a pension, they make him struggle for superiority over his fellow-man, they send his sons to Vietnam, they bolster his illusion of freedom with the ballot-box, they soothe his anxieties with piped-music … they inspire his loyalty with advertising slogans and editorial catch-cries. (1966: 374)

This rich seam of anti-suburbanism goes back at least to Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness (1960) and has provided a major reserve of themes and images for Australian writing and cultural production for over half a century (Ferber et al., 1994; Flew, in this volume; Powell, 1993; Turnbull, 2008).

It is probably also the anti-suburban tradition which has most affected recent thinking about the possibilities for the development of creative industries in Australian cities. During the period of the Howard government, in particular, the suburbs were generally recruited to a resolute utilitarianism and anti-intellectualism. The tendency reached its height during the 2004 federal election, when the member for Lindsay, Jackie Kelly, rejected suggestions of a need for increased funding for the University of Western Sydney on the grounds that ‘no-one in my electorate goes to uni’ (cited Gibson and Brennan-Horley, 2006: 455). As Chris Gibson and Chris Brennan-Horley observed:

The image of place that Kelly invoked was nostalgic and sexist: outer suburbs were meant to be working class and anti-intellectual; the commuter belt, where students weren’t present (or welcome?), where men travelled to work in factories and offices, and women were meant to look after children. (Gibson and Brennan-Horley, 2006: 456)

A narrowing of horizons for the suburbs has not been limited, however, to one side of politics. There is just the suggestion of alternative possibilities around the current Gillard government’s National Broadband Network, but the initial omission of ‘education’ from the titles of portfolios following the re-election of the government in 2010 is an indication of where it now ranks in thinking on the Labor side (see Hare, 2010). While the suburbs are politically very much in focus, the program for them is centred on ‘skills’. There may be some argument about the redistributionist function of government, but a steadfast utilitarianism remains a shared political ground.

Similar tendencies can be tracked overseas. In the United States, particularly, positions on the wisdom of foregrounding creativity have become closely aligned with the totems of city and suburbs. To side with creativity is generally to side with the city, with the polarities around the suburbs being simply reversed. On one side, Richard Florida’s (2002, 2005) arguments for a recognition of the growing economic contribution of the ‘creative class’ have been closely associated with an enthusiasm for buzzing urban zones with high ‘gay’ and ‘bohemian’ indices. On the other side, Joel Kotkin’s (2005) defence of the suburbs has been associated with a belief that the ‘real’ economy remains fairly much where it has always been: built around functional relations in the delivery of material needs.

Kotkin has been an important figure in challenging stereotypes of the suburbs and his vision of a ‘new suburbanism’ has helped to encourage more adventurous thinking among American urban planners and policy makers. He rejects ideas of suburban alienation and isolation, arguing that suburbanites ‘express a stronger sense of identity and civic involvement than city dwellers’ (Kotkin, 2010a). He also counters the common image of the suburbs as a bland monoculture, pointing to their increasing multiculturalism: ‘Nationwide, about 25 percent of suburbanites are minorities; by 2050, immigrants, their children and native-born minorities will become an even more dominant force in shaping suburbia’ (Kotkin, 2010a). And he draws attention to the changing spatial and communication ecology created by new media, as captured for example in a wonderful idea, picked up from planning consultant Walter Siembab, of ‘smart sprawl’. But Kotkin is nevertheless sceptical about placing too much importance on creative innovation: ‘Culture, media, and other “creative” industries … simply do not spark an economy on their own. It turns out to be the comparatively boring, old-fashioned industries, such as trade in goods, manufacturing, energy, and agriculture, that drive the world’s fastest-rising cities’ (Kotkin, 2010b). In the final analysis, suburbia and utilitarianism remain aligned.

There are good reasons, however, for keeping alive an idea of the suburbs as a site of creative possibility. In Australia, the simple reality is that low-density residential development at some distance from the city centre remains, overwhelmingly, the dominant settlement pattern. Writing off the suburbs comes dangerously close, in this context, to writing off the nation in general. This is probably increasingly true of other nations too. When Robin Boyd (1960: 170) suggested in the 1960s that Australia’s main contribution to civilization during the 20th century may be ‘in the experimental development of the unexciting region that is neither lonely nor busy: the suburb’, the tone appeared as faintly mocking. What contribution was that? However, the perspective shifts somewhat in the light of evidence that the Australian pattern is becoming not so much the exception as the norm. If even New York (Hammett and Hammett, 2007) and Beijing (Feng et al., 2008) are succumbing to a creeping suburbanism, to be a pioneer of suburbia no longer appears as quite so embarrassing.

Suburban education

But it is not only that we may have no option but to engage with the suburbs; there are also more positive reasons for considering their creative potential. The typical suburban area includes a wide range of educational and cultural institutions – local art galleries, music centres, museums, community arts and craft centres, adult education and community colleges, amateur theatre and music organizations, language classes and community bands and orchestras. Taken together, this represents a very considerable cultural and creative resource. Indeed, much that is identified as ‘urban’ creative production has in fact been rehearsed and developed in the suburbs, from the work of actors who develop their craft in amateur theatricals before landing a part in a television production, to that of musicians who move from suburban bedrooms and garages to city gigs and recording studios.

The point is amplified, in the case of Australia, if we consider just how much of the nation’s cultural production has come from the suburbs. From pub rock to Kylie Minogue, from Barry Humphries’ Dame Edna Everage to Kath and Kim, a very considerable proportion of Australia’s cultural output has either sprung from, or closely referenced, suburban figures, scenes and moods. There is a story to be told here which goes beyond the actual location of creative practitioners. It is still the case that many of the most successful leave the suburbs, taking up opportunities offered by city-based agents, media organizations, cultural institutions and markets, either in Australia or abroad. The narrative of relocation from suburb to city, rehearsed in many a creative biography, has contributed significantly to the negative image of suburbia, leading to an association between ‘success’ and ‘escape’. Yet something must happen in the suburbs which contributes to success. Whether or not the results are ultimately realized elsewhere, the suburbs are clearly an experimental ground on which certain kinds of creativity occur.

In the remainder of this article, I will consider the suburbs as a site of creative development, focusing particularly on questions of education. This is, in part, because education has shown up repeatedly as a key theme in interviews with creative practitioners in the suburbs. Suburban creatives are probably, on average, more involved in education than their city-based counterparts. Many combine their creative work with teaching – whether in private tuition, in positions in schools, colleges and suburban university campuses or, on a voluntary basis, in community organizations or the University of the Third Age. For a surprising number of others, there is an educational aspect to their creative practice – from mentoring young street artists to writing information books, for use in schools, on history or the environment.

But education is also a promising area to consider in reflecting more abstractly on the specificity of the suburbs and the creative possibilities they hold. As in many other areas, education in the suburbs has a tendency towards the informal, the local, the privatized, the voluntary and self-directed. It partakes of what John Hartley calls ‘DIY citizenship’, less mediated through formal institutions than other citizenly practices. The term has a suburban provenance: the idea of ‘DIY’ is most familiar from the amateur end of home improvement, ‘installing the material basis for the ideology of domesticity in the form of particle-board, paint and a patio’ (Hartley, 1999: 178). As Hartley develops it, it is also integrally connected with education, at least in the sense of a formation of the self. He takes his lead in part from a 1960 essay on television by Richard Hoggart: ‘In any society a medium so intimate and pervasive will [be an educator in manners]; it is bound constantly to be putting before people other ways of shaking hands, of sitting down, of wearing clothes, of reacting to strangers, of eating, of carrying on conversations …’ (Hoggart, cited in Hartley, 1999: 179). Despite the informality and privacy of the lounge, television viewers are nevertheless learning, ‘assembling themselves’ from the palette of options presented to them.

‘I’m free in this area’

The idea of learning as self-formation resonates strongly with interviews with suburban creative practitioners in the ‘Creative Suburbia’ project from which the research for this article is drawn (see also Flew, in this volume). One of the most consistent themes of the 133 interviews conducted across six outer suburban locations in Melbourne and Brisbane is a freedom from institutional and social pressures which suburban spaces are seen to allow. In some cases, this is expressed simply as an appreciation of the relative abundance of space. A mixed media practitioner from Frankston in outer Melbourne told us, for example, how a garage was important in her decision on where to live. In her current house, she also has a room devoted to creative activity:

… and the one good thing now, because we’ve got this place, the room in there which is a computer room is also set up with my sewing machine and that so I can leave it out and come in whenever I feel like it. Once the studio is done, it’s going to be even better because then I can put my easel up, have my paints out, because that’s the frustrating thing of having to put things away all the time. You lose it you know, you just get to a point where it’s aagh it’s no use. (Sculptor/painter, Frankston)

Similarly, some musicians described the practical decisions in finding somewhere they could get away with making some noise. As one told us of other members of his band, ‘these guys have got the studio in their house pretty much.… Yeah and they don’t get any complaints from the neighbours pretty much’ (Musician, Frankston).

The relative abundance of space in the suburbs is more than simply material. It is associated at a more abstract level with freedom and an openness to experimentation. As a visual artist, also from Frankston, put it:

I’m free in this area, I mean no one knows … oh she’s not an artist, she hasn’t done a degree or anything. I’ve got that freedom to do what I want to do. I can enter competitions or I don’t have to, I can enter them in a different name … and I find that it works that way! You’ve got more heart that way and people keep on wanting my art. Every time I make something it sells now and it’s like … okay. (Visual artist, Frankston)

After the interview, we were shown an inventive ‘hat’ made from a cardboard box with a tube running around the outside. As the wearer moved his or her head, a ball-bearing ran around the tube, giving peculiar feedback on balance and movement. Considered in isolation, such an example could be dismissed as merely a trivial eccentricity. But in the wider context of the interviews, it can also be seen as more than that, exemplifying a distinctive quality in the culture of the suburbs: a lack of inhibition and an interest in improvisation, a quality which spills over into a range of creative practices – a quality that encourages ‘heart’.

One of the most interesting perspectives on this quality came from a street artist who observed that it is significant not only in cultural production but also in the way cultural products are received. While a critic of many aspects of the suburbs, he was nevertheless impressed by the way many suburban onlookers responded to his work:

they’re very open, they’re a bit slow, they have time, you know, they’re not … as stressed.… And they bring all that to the public realm and sometimes they, like we all do, they step outside … of their own limitations for reasons which are quite unexpected. Sometimes it’s because they’re having a great day, so they’re slower, so they stop and they look. Sometimes it’s the reverse you know, they get surprised or stopped by something. They get annoyed by it or they get pleasure out of it and then they stop to reflect on it to some degree. Sometimes they even engage in conversation. (Street artist, Frankston)

At one level, again, this could appear inconsequential: we are talking only about some conversations over pieces of street art, conversations that may go nowhere. But at another level, there is a quality of engagement and an originality of perception which suburban creative practitioners clearly value.

Governing for creative freedom

What policy program might be suggested for this field of creative potential? In the funding application to the Australian Research Council, the ‘Creative Suburbia’ project was required to make a case for ‘National Benefit’. The application took its lead in this from the arguments of Richard Florida (2005), Charles Landry and Franco Bianchini (1995), Charles Leadbeater and Kate Oakley (1999) and others about the value of creative innovation in stimulating the economies of cities and regions. These arguments have had remarkable success over the last 20 years in energizing policy thinking about the revitalization of cities and inner urban spaces around the world. Why not also employ them in seeking a revitalization of that most Australian of urban forms – the suburb?

There are, however, some challenges in making this translation. The value placed on ‘freedom’ in the suburbs – on ‘doing your own thing’, on openness and experimentation – may have its strengths, but it also makes it difficult to see an obvious policy opening. Many suburban creative practitioners are wary of formal organizations and their participation in professional associations is generally low. Part of the reason for this is simply practical: many point out, for example, that meetings are held in the city, often requiring two or three hours for a return journey from the suburbs, making it difficult for them to attend. But there is also a resistance to participation which goes beyond this. As a suburban journalist put it frankly, ‘I’m a non-joiner’: he would not be interested in participating in formal organizations, even if he could. This resistance is not just personal, but is articulated to a more general suburban identity. It is a matter of keeping a distance from the over-governed life of the city: ‘all your transport is timetables, the buildings, the cleaners are in at a certain time, the lights are on and off. So there are timetables, more fixed, I think, in the city’ (Journalist, Frankston).

One response to this might be to suggest that no policy program is needed, that government should simply leave the field of suburban creativity to flourish spontaneously. Such a conclusion could also be drawn from following through Hartley’s idea of DIY citizenship. The idea is developed as a critical counter to classical ‘Birminghamite’ cultural studies, with its focus on themes of power and ideology. The tendency of the latter, Hartley argues, was always to find something to be corrected in mainstream media and popular cultural practices – the operation of class domination, patriarchy, racism or heterosexism. Despite its criticism of older forms of cultural elitism, it still assumed a special insight on the part of the cultural critic and countenanced a governmental paternalism in directing the lives of ‘the masses’. To recognize DIY citizenship is, by contrast, to recognize that people are quite capable of getting along by themselves and, indeed, that any attempted ‘correction’ may only distort or suppress the meanings and identities they create. Formal schooling and the Reithian tradition of public broadcasting are, for Hartley, to be held in particular suspicion.

There are problems, however, in the idea of a simple abdication of government from the development of suburban creativity. Suburban creative practitioners often suffer from isolation and disconnection, failing to recognize their potential either personally or in the wider social and economic contribution they might make. As an illustrator put it: ‘There’s an absolute disadvantage living this far out … I miss a lot of networking … the distance impacts on your work’ (Illustrator, Frankston). Invisibility and lack of recognition are common themes. A craft and textile worker expressed astonishment, after moving to Redcliffe in outer Brisbane, at how many other creative practitioners she discovered there: ‘Yeah, more and more I’m amazed at who does live in suburbia. And how unnoticed they go like. Sometimes I think, if I can miss you, if I never knew that you lived here … like … how many other people live here that I don’t know?’ (Designer/textile worker, Redcliffe). Invisibility may provide a cloak for creative freedom, but it also has costs in a loss of opportunity and lack of professional development. As an artist from Frankston lamented, ‘There’s some who just end up doing their own stuff at home and really just going and waitressing and doing whatever and not going far’ (Visual artist, Frankston).

There is, admittedly, an ambivalence at the heart of many of these comments. On the one hand, the relative freedom of the suburbs from governmental intrusion can be valued for the openness and experimentation it allows while, on the other, being regretted for the lack of recognition and support it entails. A musician from Redcliffe in outer Brisbane came close to admitting this paradox in himself:

I find it very difficult to be involved with structure that doesn’t allow me flexibility because I get anxious. Like when I’m in front of a class teaching … and I get a tune in my head because someone’s humming something, I seriously just need to get a guitar and start playing it. I really … I just don’t want to be there any more and I just want to come home and play. (Musician, Redcliffe)

It might be taken as given that creatives can be ‘difficult’. This should not excuse us, however, from trying to do more with the creative possibilities of the suburbs, allowing us to fall back into the complacent defeatism of ‘What can you really expect out there?’

Bildung in the ’burbs

Not to leave this problem hanging, I want to suggest that there is a value in reaching back to an older idea than DIY citizenship, of education as self-formation – the classical German concept of Bildung. It is one which might appear, at first, as oddly out of place. With aristocratic social origins, it has often been associated in its later development with a purist defence of the humanities as an end in themselves. It is not obviously suited either to Australian suburbia or to problems of industry development. As I have argued elsewhere, however, there are some structural similarities between the situation of the suburbs and the condition of the Germans in the 18th and 19th century (Gibson, 2011). Like suburban creatives, German writers, artists and intellectuals during this period were relatively scattered and isolated. They also valued their independence, developing for themselves an identity which made it a virtue to be set off against the more regimented life of other social figurations, particularly the closely governed courts and cities of metropolitan France and England (Gibson, 2011). If we look, furthermore, to the actual origins of the concept of Bildung – particularly in the writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt – we find that it has not always been as opposed to the governmental calculations as it is sometimes represented as being.

According to Humboldt scholar David Sorkin, Humboldt wrestled all his life with a dilemma between the virtues of independence and a recognition of the resources of the state. He was himself trained for state service and entered the Prussian civil service in his early twenties. He revolted, however, against the narrow instrumentalism of work as a government functionary and, having means, retired for a life as an independent scholar. In his first major work, The Limits of State Action, he asserted the political sovereignty of man’s inward development, his Bildung:

Humboldt envisages man as a dynamic organism uniquely characterized by his energy: ‘Energy (Kraft) appears to me to be the first and unique virtue of mankind.’ An individual’s development depends upon finding appropriate outlets for his energy so that he can engage in activity by means of which he realizes his potentialities and increases his abilities. One essential condition for such activity is freedom: one must be assured of the freedom to act for oneself, that is, to be self-reliant. (Sorkin, 1983: 58)

Yet even at this point, he was occupied also with a second, somewhat contradictory, imperative: that of social organization. Freedom alone was not sufficient for Bildung; it also required ‘social intercourse’: ‘one develops through the voluntary interchange of one’s individuality with that of others. Self-formation, in other words, requires social bonds’ (Sorkin, 1983: 58). As Humboldt came later to recognize, in a modern society the resources of government are indispensable in this.

When, after almost ten years, Humboldt returned to the civil service as Minister of Education, it was in an effort to resolve this apparent contradiction. The solution he offered was that the state should adopt an enabling function. It should provide the ‘outward framework, the institutions, and initial finances’ for education or Bildung, without seeking to direct the specific content. The obvious question which arises from this is how, from the point of view of the state itself, this could ever be justified. What could explain an investment in education – a considerable one at that – where there was no guarantee of return? But Humboldt did have an answer: that, albeit indirectly, support for the education of ‘free individuals’ was the most effective way for the state to develop the capacities of the citizenry. As Sorkin (1983: 65) paraphrases: ‘State purposes will be best met by educating individuals to develop their unique characters rather than by subjecting them to a stultifying vocational training. If allowed to develop freely, each person will also be a productive and contributing citizen.’ All Humboldt’s arguments were directed to showing that ‘individuals will ultimately be better citizens than men educated to be citizens, just as science left to its own devices will be more fruitful than science supervised by the state’ (Sorkin, 1983: 64).

These themes are very relevant to battles currently being fought out in Australia around creativity in the suburbs. There is, for example, a robust debate in suburban Technical and Further Education (TAFE) colleges over the tendency of the last 20 years towards narrow vocationalism. According to an artist from Frankston, this development is putting courses in creative practice at risk:

it’s the idea that the Victorian government has put into play that everything has to be rationalized and that everything has to be job training and so if you can’t demonstrate that the graduates from a program have gone into a job in that field they don’t think it’s worth doing … TAFE used to be about continuing education and now it’s about training people for jobs, to have apprenticeships, further certification for people … (Artist, Frankston)

The concern is not restricted to those in the purer ‘arts’ practices. It is echoed, for example, by a graphic designer, who lamented the lack of any serious creative aspiration in courses on computer graphics and web design: ‘TAFEs out here have no creative courses at all … I did a web design course and … they did some software that was just ridiculous’ (Graphic designer, Frankston).

One of the most promising counters to this development has been a kind of economic Humboldtism. The most effective argument for education in creative practice at Chisholm TAFE in Frankston, for example, is (according to the artist quoted above) that ‘creative orientation is critical in any industry, it doesn’t matter where you go, you need people who are thinking “How can I get that done?”’ The position is simply expressed, but is in fact quite sophisticated, bearing comparison with recent arguments such as those of educational theorist and consultant Ken Robinson, for the value of generic creative capacities and the contribution they can make across the economy (Robinson, 2001: 183–203). It steers a difficult but important course between the naïve romanticism of the ‘autonomous artist’ and the false pragmatism of reducing education simply to the transfer of vocational skills. As in the classical development of the idea of Bildung, it recognizes the legitimacy of governmental accounting for investments in education, while also resisting the deadening effect that can be the result of a narrow interpretation of such accounting.

This is hardly a developed program for the creative industries in the suburbs. Indeed, to talk it up in positive terms runs somewhat against the perceptions of many suburban creatives, for whom the outlook is depressing. But it does remind us of an opening. The general proposition of the ‘Creative Suburbia’ project has been that more attention should be directed to the place of the suburbs in the development of creative economies. As I have suggested above, the possibilities here are in many ways exciting. There are challenges from a policy perspective in the often closely guarded independence of suburban creative practitioners. While invisibility and lack of connection are the obvious problems that policy intervention might seek to address, we should not assume that such intervention will always necessarily be welcomed. These challenges are not without a context, however; nor are they entirely new. There are long traditions of responses to them and we owe it to the suburbs to extend on those traditions.