University of Wisconsin Madison - Badger Yearbook (Madison, WI)

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21 But I like the noble word “radical. It means of the root or to the root. The radical must know things from the ground up. He must know how and why the thing is as it is because he knows that life can be kept living only by growing. Growth is his passionate concern. Iking radical he is therefore truly conservative and is the only man to be trusted with the life of anything or able to invest the changes natural to organic growth in either law or edu-cation. The radical alone sees that life itself is growth, and to avoid the agony of disestablishment he would pre-pare for it in any necessary form he would make. ■ Now popular education, being from the top down, is not radical in any sense. ■ As already said “education is a coward where life or action is concerned and cowardly to such an extent that in all forms of self expression other than classical conformity or money-getting we seem to have no soul to call our own nor do we seem to be very deeply interested in one of any kind. ■ We are pretty comfortable, thank you, and fairly rich by way of what has been developed by way of the other fellow. ■ The history of what he did is with us as our popular “art and we live in houses built by the dead for the living—practice all forms of obsolescence from an antique Jewish money-changers' money-system and the old fuedal system of landlord and tenant to a wholly subservient religion, politics and art. ■ Too much comfort seems to have murdered what passion young souls might have known and has done so by advice of counsel “Education. ■ But signs of revolt are not lacking. Going about the country from coast to coast and from North to South pleading the cause of architecture, even in our universities 1 find healthy resentment growing against arm-chair education. Rebellion is as necessary as amity if life is to go on worthwhile as any affair of our own. Rebellion is necessary if the organic law of natural change is to be acknowledged and made a feature of our establishment in order that we may not continually live in fear, tortured by economic anxiety, frustrate from beginning to end. If we aim at St. Mark's as Exhibited in the Frank Lloyd Wright Show at the Wisconsin Union Gallery

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20 CONCERNING EDUCATION As advocate of an organic arci ally learned that no architects our system of education stands. Nor great art ot any kind. Youth Our system or education in general science, is a coward afraid to look within who does so. With infinite tact and patience textbook and class complacent inertia ii not permanent sterility in the realm ot imagination where imagina tion becomes action. 1 believe vve are all born either young or old. We see students, young in years, already old and others, well along in years, young as ever. So we may believe that youth is a quality and this quality is characterized by love, sincerity, determination and courage. All or these characteristics are conspicuously absent in academic circles, even in thought. As for these qualities in action -no action, as academic, is possible. It is not even properly thinkable. It is not “being done. Why wonder, then, that we are, the world over, acknowledged to bean un creative people? Inventive, ingenious, but in no true sense whatever, creative. Nearly everything we have as either institution or gentility we got from the top down that is to say by borrowing or accepting it ready made. We are cleverly capable of adapt-ing or adopting or transplanting or transposing anything or everything because we are specialists of long standing in all these forms of brokerage. We are the world’s best broker, but we can neither govern, build, draw, sculp, nor play from the ground upward, that is to say from within outward. We makeshift so. naturally, we fear the radical and call “conservative the lid-sitter the stand-patter the pompous “flu-flu bird who would “hold everything where it is: he would protect the fixture. The frame work of our entire civilization being a futive fixture like some chandelier precariously hanging from the ceiling. We have a sad of the jitters when anyone approaches the pome of fixment to learn how the thing where it hangs.

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22 anything higher, now, than conventional or pecuniary success, the sincerity inevitable to high aim becomes a quality of the hero, while such art as we know can only be had by way of taste. ■ But I know of no great civilization ever built by way of “taste. Art must always take the lead, as it has in any true form of culture. Every living people leaving us a record of their life to read as great art, lived that art as their own life or the other end around lived their lives as great art. We are not a happy people in this sense. We are missing something of immense consequence. And what is missing cannot be taught. It may be engendered. Therefore we need engendering culture more and need informative education much less. Dutchmen made the queen of the garden from the lowly larkspur by way of culture, not by way of education. They studied the nature of the Larkspur, the climatic and soil conditions it loved and planted it where these abounded: took the finer specimens that grew and gave them more of the thing natural to their growth until we got the Delphinium. The Taliesin ' Fellowship ■RANK U.OYD WRIGHT ARCHITECT tea room under K kitchen L bo i rooms M qiris rooms N machine shops O p r i n f shop P leader R associate leoders S quest house T foremen help U qaraqrr 'Z light plont reserve wafer nippb ! barns stable