Editing Arts and Crafts movement (section)

==Art education==
Morris's ideas were adopted by the [[New Education Movement]] in the late 1880s, which incorporated handicraft teaching in schools at Abbotsholme (1889) and [[Bedales]] (1892), and his influence has been noted in the social experiments of [[Dartington Hall]] during the mid-20th century.{{sfn|MacCarthy|1994|p=603}}

Arts and Crafts practitioners in Britain were critical of the government system of art education based on design in the abstract with little teaching of practical craft. This lack of craft training also caused concern in industrial and official circles, and in 1884 a Royal Commission (accepting the advice of William Morris) recommended that art education should pay more attention to the suitability of design to the material in which it was to be executed.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.morrissociety.org/publications/JWMS/AU94.11.1.HarveyPress.pdf|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20150105132211/http://www.morrissociety.org/publications/JWMS/AU94.11.1.HarveyPress.pdf|url-status=dead|title=Charles Harvey and Jon Press, "William Morris and the Royal Commission on Technical Instruction", ''Journal of the William Morris Society'' 11.1, August 1994, pp. 31–34|archivedate=5 January 2015}}</ref> The first school to make this change was the [[Birmingham Art School|Birmingham School of Arts and Crafts]], which "led the way in introducing executed design to the teaching of art and design nationally (working in the material for which the design was intended rather than designing on paper). In his external examiner's report of 1889, Walter Crane praised Birmingham School of Art in that it 'considered design in relationship to materials and usage.{{'"}}<ref>{{cite web| url = http://fineart.ac.uk/institutions.php?idinst=9| title = "Birmingham Institute of Art and Design" fineart.ac.uk}}</ref> Under the direction of Edward Taylor, its headmaster from 1877 to 1903, and with the help of [[Henry Payne (artist)|Henry Payne]] and [[Joseph Southall]], the Birmingham School became a leading Arts-and-Crafts centre.<ref>{{cite web|last=Everitt|first=Sian|title=Keeper of Archives|url=http://fineart.ac.uk/institutions.php?idinst=9|work=Birmingham Institute of Art and Design|access-date=17 September 2011}}</ref>

[[File:Frampton 1890.jpg|thumb|right|Season ticket to The Arts and Craft Exhibition Society, [[George Frampton]], 1890]]

Other local authority schools also began to introduce more practical teaching of crafts, and by the 1890s Arts and Crafts ideals were being disseminated by members of the Art Workers Guild into art schools throughout the country. Members of the Guild held influential positions: Walter Crane was director of the [[Manchester School of Art]] and subsequently the [[Royal College of Art]]; F.M. Simpson, [[Robert Anning Bell]] and C.J.Allen were respectively professor of architecture, instructor in painting and design, and instructor in sculpture at [[Liverpool School of Art]]; Robert Catterson-Smith, the headmaster of the Birmingham Art School from 1902 to 1920, was also an AWG member; [[W. R. Lethaby]] and [[George Frampton]] were inspectors and advisors to the [[London County Council]]'s (LCC) education board and in 1896, largely as a result of their work, the LCC set up the [[Central School of Arts and Crafts]] and made them joint principals.<ref name=macdonald/> Until the formation of the Bauhaus in Germany, the Central School was regarded as the most progressive art school in Europe.{{sfn|Naylor|1971|p=179}} Shortly after its foundation, the [[Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts]] was set up on Arts and Crafts lines by the local borough council.

As head of the Royal College of Art in 1898, Crane tried to reform it along more practical lines, but resigned after a year, defeated by the bureaucracy of the [[Board of Education (United Kingdom)|Board of Education]], who then appointed Augustus Spencer to implement his plan. Spencer brought in Lethaby to head its school of design and several members of the Art Workers' Guild as teachers.<ref name=macdonald>Stuart Macdonald, ''The History and Philosophy of Art Education'', London: University of London Press, 1970.  {{ISBN|0 340 09420 6}}</ref> Ten years after reform, a committee of inquiry reviewed the RCA and found that it was still not adequately training students for industry.<ref>''Report of the Departmental Committee on the Royal College of Art'', HMSO, 1911</ref>

In the debate that followed the publication of the committee's report, C.R.Ashbee published a highly critical essay, ''Should We Stop Teaching Art'', in which he called for the system of art education to be completely dismantled and for the crafts to be learned in state-subsidised workshops instead.<ref>C.R.Ashbee, ''Should We Stop Teaching Art?'', 1911</ref> [[Lewis Foreman Day]], an important figure in the Arts and Crafts movement, took a different view in his dissenting report to the committee of inquiry, arguing for greater emphasis on principles of design against the growing orthodoxy of teaching design by direct working in materials. Nevertheless, the Arts and Crafts ethos thoroughly pervaded British art schools and persisted, in the view of the historian of art education, Stuart MacDonald, until after the Second World War.<ref name=macdonald/>