[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obTNwPJvOI8]

Indeed, my own college experience was such that I’ve always wanted to go back. Real life isn’t all that bad, except for the constant bills in the mailbox. And the aging, although the wisdom that comes with age is almost worth the body falling apart bit. But my years at the university were good times, and that without ever once getting drunk or high.

However, I’ve wondered about the value of my degree in the past five years or so. Is college really all that? The impression me and my fellow high school students were given back in the early 90s was that it is all that. If you’re gonna be a somebody you gotta go to a four-year school.

I don’t really believe that anymore, and neither does John Stossel.

[YouTube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl_24uSPedM&feature=player_embedded]

I didn’t go to college just so I could earn more money than a high school grad, which seems to be the focus of this video. I trained my eye on the university because I really wanted to be an architect, and there was no way to become an architect if you didn’t have degree. Of course, I changed my major two years in, but that’s another story for another time.

From time to time I wonder what I would have done if I hadn’t attended the university. A two-year school seems like a good option. In fact, people I knew at Southeast Community College were getting a better education than I was in graphic design, and I could studied ceramics there as well. I’ve also thought of owning rentals. A lot of people don’t have the right temperament to do this well (including our landlord down in Arkansas from four years back), but I believe I do, and it seemed like a way to make a good living. And maybe I’d be building furniture.

Other than pointing out our cultural blindness with respect to four-year degrees, I like how Stossel’s spot affirms the value of working with your hands, something The Aesthetic Elevator is all about.

Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.

Since Sarah Hempel Irani mentioned to me that Notre Dame covers tuition for MFA students, if you can actually get in, I’ve done a little nosing around on their website. It was much easier to find works by Bill Kremer, ceramics prof at Notre Dame. I liked this installation of his work well enough that I thought I’d share it.

I think the one front and center in the photograph is my favorite, at least from what I can tell. This show was at the Charlie Cummings Gallery in Gainesville, Florida. (Glad I didn’t have to transport all of those large pots from Indiana down to the swamp!)

Regardless, since we have so little apparent direction, I gave my sister-in-law’s idea a few minutes worth of internet research. I learned that real estate in Muncie seems to be very inexpensive (from what a person can tell on the internet, not knowing the quality of a neighborhood and such), and found in particular a swell old house on the historical registry for under $45k.

I also surfed around Ball State’s website and learned that BSU offers an MA in studio art, but not an MFA. This was a bit surprising; I expected a university of that size to offer the latter.

I haven’t given serious consideration to an MA up to now, mainly because it’s not a terminal degree, required for teaching at the college level. I asked a friend at JBU if they’d hire someone with an MA, and he replied “Yes, if they’re working towards a terminal degree.” That makes an MA pretty much worthless to me from what I can tell, unless it counts towards an MFA program in the future — which it might (if you know, please comment!).

I’ve had some conversation about MAs and MFAs with artist Sarah Irani. Sarah has a friend who earned an MFA from the University of Dallas and had a terrible experience. She quotes her friend: “As for grad school, it’s a waste because it is 1% useful instruction on making/becoming an artist and 99% a vetting and indoctrination process to weed out ‘the unworthy.’” I have to hope that my own alma mater, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, is more than this based on my knowledge of its ceramics department. However, the Art School Confidential stereotype has all to much basis in reality.

Sarah has an MA. She listed her reasons for not getting an MFA in an email:

* I was working at a college that offered an MA. I got tuition reimbursement for working there.
* I didn’t want to deal with the crap that they dish out at art schools.
* I was working as an apprentice to a sculptor on big commissions from the time that I graduated until after I was married. There was no sense in paying to get an MFA when I was operating my own studio and getting paid to do big sculptures.
* By the time I was done with the commissions, I was married and wasn’t in the position to move to be close to a school. I could have driven over an hour each way to Baltimore or Washington, but the expense would have been unbearable.
* The expense. My friend who went to University of Dallas is so overwhelmed by student debt that she’ll never afford a home. I do not recommend getting into debt with an MFA. It doesn’t pay off.

“All of that being said, an MA works for me and my situation. What are your goals? If your goals are anything other than being a college professor, I say skip the MFA. It is probably a waste of your time. If you want to be a professor, then you more or less have to go,” she continued, and then suggested Notre Dame, which apparently doesn’t charge MFA students tuition. Sounds too good to be true, but I plan to look into it anyway!

Of course that’s just what I need, another option.

Sarah reminded me this afternoon, as we chatted via Gmail, that such a circumstance as my wife and I find ourselves in is also an exciting time. She quoted her father, who used to tell her “that if I didn’t have a word from God, to move in the direction of my desires and trust God to care for me.

Not my selfish desires, mind you.”

I share your frustrations. I graduated with the first cohort in Fuller’s MA in Th. and Arts. Not quite as advertised. I am equipped to analyze culture and, to some extent art (but mostly as an “artifact of culture?”), but am by no means a more advanced writer. To my chagrin, SPU now has a highly regarded MFA, but in creative writing alone, I believe, which would have been right up my alley about $35,000 ago, and in some sense what I was looking for through Fuller, but never quite became a reality. Your best bet may be APU or a public university supplemented with a dedicated Christian artist community or even selected readings, through, say, an APU prof.

Encounter is pretty much the same cost as the April retreat for people who care for artists — although I could drive to Austin and will fly to New York — however the IAM conference seems as though it could be a springboard of sorts for me into a more serious artistic career. It’s geared more toward artists from what I can tell. I also have two options for lodging in the City, one with a Siloam Springs acquaintance involved in ArtServe International who is also attending the conference, and also with family across the river in Jersey. The email, interestingly and wisely, from IAM also suggests local monasteries as places to bunk.

The practical side of me is saying things like “You shouldn’t spend that money because . . . ” The visionary and artistic side of me is saying things like “This is a Divine opportunity and it clicked this week for a reason . . . ” At this point I’m leaning towards going, and hoping to get my brother to come along. I feel like I need to make a decision quickly, while airfare is still good and I have a chance to nail down a place to stay.

I’ve transcribed a couple of sections here for your reading pleasure, if you can’t find the time to watch the spot it its entirety.

Creativity now is as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status . . .

Kids aren’t frightened of being wrong. Now, I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is that if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original . . . and by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. We run our companies this way; we stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst things you can make, and the result is that we’re educating people out of their creative capacities.

Robinson, a Brit who moved to L.A. five years ago, doesn’t fail to point out that basically everywhere you go with a public education system you see the same hierarchy, where mathematics and literacy are at the top and the arts are at the bottom.

We all have bodies, don’t we. Did I miss a meeting? Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads, and slightly to one side. If you were to visit education as an alien and say ‘What’s it for, public education?’ I think you’d have to conclude, if you look at the output . . . I think you’ve had to conclude the whole purpose of public education through the world is to produce university professors . . .

In my experience professors, not all of them, but typically they live in their heads . . . They’re disembodied . . . They look at their body as a form of transport for their heads. You know; don’t they. It’s a way of getting their head to meetings.

Sir Robinson goes on to point out that there were no public education systems before the 19th century, and that said education was created to meet the needs of industrialism. He further notes that academic ability has come to dominate our idea of intelligence. The end point being to get into the university. Intelligence is diverse, he rightly points out, as well as dynamic.

I’ll finish by exhorting you to watch the video; there’s a lot there that I haven’t transcribed. Pay close attention to the anecdote near the end of the video talking regarding Gillian Lynn, who choreographed Cats and Phantom of the Opera.

I found the video via Diving Into the Clay.

Adding: One last quote: “Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip mined the earth for a particular commodity, and for the future it won’t service. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children.”

Let me first say that their website is — while not fabulous — a lot better than some other university websites my wife and I have perused over the last four months or so. We’ve been surprised at the lack of organization on these websites, websites that host an incredible amount of information and need to be meticulously ordered to be useful. When looking around the UofA’s site, I generally found what I was looking for quickly. The same was not true for other schools, such as Iowa State.

The ceramics department possesses adequate resources — better than some other midwest schools I’ve looked at, but not the best. It lacks a wood fired kiln, for instance, although this isn’t something I count a necessity. The department is headed up by Jeannie Hulen; she’s the only staff in the department. This is somewhat disappointing to a graduate of the University of Nebraska, where three professors shared teaching responsibilities in clay. This provided for a great diversity of expertise and style, a very well-rounded learning experience.

The advantage of the University of Arkansas is that we’re already here. It’s a commute to Fayetteville from Siloam, but only around 30 minutes to campus from our house if traffic is reasonable. This drive may be offset by potential relocation and out-of-state tuition costs if we were to move for the schooling (and begin school before establishing residency).

The following are some questions I asked Jeannie about the program this week and her prompt (albeit grammar-less) replies. I’ve inserted punctuation and articles for clarity:

Are you the only prof in the ceramics department?

Yes, but we have a tech position and they have a MFA in ceramics; also my husband is a potter and accessible, along with Bethany Springer — the sculpture — prof is fantastic.

How many grad students are in the ceramics department, on average?

My goal is 3-5.

What are my chances of getting funding for the MFA (fellowships and assistantships)?

First year is tough, but second and third are more likely.

What is the cost (tuition) of the program (I didn’t look for this online, but I suppose it’s there)?

I’m not sure, but in-state is reasonable.How established is the ceramics department at the UofA? How long has the MFA program included ceramics?

This is my sixth year; the program before me had no reputation. With all of my work on our Ceramics symposiums, we are nationally significant for such a small program, and my grads and undergrads do very well. For over 20 years ceramics has been included in the MFA.

Do you have links to online galleries of the ceramic prof’s own work?

If you Google me, you can see some of my work, as well as at http://art.uark.edu/galleryOfWork-fac/ or http://art.uark.edu/ceramics/info/?page_id=9

I looked cost up on the UofA website. Spring semester of 2008 is $280 per credit hour for graduate students in the fine arts, if I read the chart correctly. This is commensurate with most other midwest schools I’ve looked at such as Missouri, KU, KSU, ISU — the one exception was the University of Minnesota in St. Paul, which cost about twice as much as the others.

Of course, the question remains as to whether or not I will actually go after an MFA. I may be leaning towards it right now (60/40, perhaps?), but it’s by no means certain.

For the past five years (as of next month) my wife and I have been in various stages of fundraising, working outside of the ministry as needed and part-time for the ministry as moneys allowed. We’ve never reached full support. In other words, I’ve never been able to work full-time at full salary indefinitely. Life has been in limbo.

I’ve been able to work full-time at a partial salary for most of this year, but come December the money looked to run dry. So my wife and I worked out a plan: We figured we’d be able to continue working part-time with M-DAT if we moved to a larger town with better prospects for other part-time work and less expensive housing. So late this summer we made two eight-hour drives to such a community looking at real estate.

Some may wonder why we wouldn’t just sell our house and rent. While we like owning a home, renting would be fine. However, we hope to take the next two or three years to work on our arts and crafts — ceramics, crochet, writing — while looking at the possibility of grad school, which I’ve mentioned here numerous times now. Thus we need space (and the flexibility to modify said space) for my kiln and clay studio as well as storage for my wife’s yarn and scarves.

So we made an offer on a house, a 100 year old house we liked quite a bit.

It’s in great shape (except for the roof) and completely modern with the formal layout of an older home. We did this at 9 a.m. and then drove home. Halfway home my boss called my wife’s cell phone and gave us the good news that a very large donation arrived in the mail for us. This donation was very unexpected and would essentially allow us to be fully supported for almost two years.

But we’d already made an offer on the house. We’d already taken the time to drive to Nebraska, look at 16 different homes and mess around with paperwork at the bank. Now we learn about the new money? After we’ve agonized over this decision for months and become somewhat emotionally attached to this house? God does have a sense of humor.

And we were confused; very confused.

The sellers countered which gave us an out, but we weren’t able to ignore everything that had transpired. So after numerous conversations this weekend, where we hashed and rehashed the same things again and again, we decided to accept the seller’s counter-offer. I won’t go into the myriad of details, tangible and intangible, that influenced our decision. Suffice it to say that the contract is contingent on the sale of our Arkansas house, and we decided that if it doesn’t sell we weren’t meant to move to Nebraska.

After I got enough paint on the siding to tell how it was going to look — the first sprayer I rented wasn’t working — I stepped back to take it in. It caused me to remember how important the idea of beauty is to me. I agonize over visual details that, besides driving my wife up the beautifully purple-painted bungalow walls, most people never notice. And I don’t consider myself much of a detail-oriented person, but with respect to the information my eyes take in I suppose I am just that.

I don’t pretend to be able to define what is beautiful or know what is Beautiful (notice the capital “B”), but I do seek out the idea and attempt to create objects and environments that reach for the most pulchritudinous experience.

I’m writing this because it plays into my thoughts on going after an MFA. It reminds me that my interests really are much broader than studio art. An MFA may still be the best way to go, to further my ability to define and render beauty, but at this point I can’t be certain.

And, frankly, I probably won’t ever be certain.