Can you get an art education for free?
With all of the available online resources, many young artists may ask themselves, “Can I get a good art education for free online?” This is a really great question, especially if you are from a low-income family and don’t have access to many of the privileges that come with going to college or university, or taking any online paid courses. It doesn’t need to be said how engaged everyone is in the online world today; simply search YouTube to find educational content, and much of it is very well done. With so many great instructional videos, it begs the question: why go to art school and pay so much money for an education that could be found online cheaply or for free?
My answer to this is multi-faceted. In an ideal world, you probably could get something similar to an art school education, or perhaps even better in some ways, but most people will not endure an entirely self-motivated educational path. Many young students don’t have consistent study habits unless they are being pressured by external forces. This is a prevalent view of young people, and indicates that we are lacking the internal work ethic that I believe was more common in past generations when life was actually tougher in some ways; there was a little more internal grit and passion to motivate oneself. I feel that we still actually have this grit and passion, but that it is constantly being subverted by the “tentacles” of the modern age, or the distractive forces that also come with the freedom of content that the internet provides. It is a double-edged sword that isn’t easy to interpret as a whole. I have noticed myself caught in this tendency in which I’ll buy online courses, or sign up occasionally for a free MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), such as provided by Coursera, but my focus is distracted and eventually I forget about my original intention and goals. It is difficult to follow a straight line when swimming in the ocean of the internet.
After looking into it, I find that the news seemed to agree with the sentiments I felt when I dove into them myself:
The “Depressing” And “Disheartening” News About MOOCs
The conclusion from this study was that “’Course completion rates are often low: Around 20%’ at those institutions, and that is ‘among students who intend to complete’ them.”
This article has even more depressing statistics: Why MOOCs Didn't Work, in 3 Data Points
“Among all MOOC participants, 3.13 percent completed their courses in 2017-18, down from about 4 percent the two previous years and nearly 6 percent in 2014-15.”
While you may think “Well, I’m going to be one of the 3.13% to follow through till the end”, just know that the fact that you live in the modern world means that the statistics are against you. If this was in the early 1900s when there was far less distraction a mere finger swipe away, I think these statistics might be far more optimistic.
Our society currently requires a little more human-to-human accountability than a completely self-created apprenticeship path provides. Perhaps it is the fear of having to show up without completed homework, or perhaps it’s having others tell us what we need to do next. I’m not sure, and I don’t want to swim in these waters as it would indicate that we need authority figures to tell us what to do, which I don’t think is true. I think this is an unfortunate by-product of our modern education system. People have great potential for curiosity and creativity, but education throughout childhood teaches us that homework is something that is done for a teacher, and not for yourself. However simple it might be to understand this, it is deeply bred in our bones, and thus extremely difficult to simply change habitually. In fact, it is embedded in many of the ways we interact with the world even beyond education.
If it was as simple as creating your own curriculum of YouTube videos to get you from point A to point B, then we would already have seen droves of people choosing to leave the traditional education route behind. Perhaps we still will, but the data doesn’t seem to indicate it. I think what tends to happen in reality is that students begin with an impassioned drive, and remain consistent and disciplined in their habits for a while, but then, day by day, their drive is gradually eroded by one distraction or another. 0n occasion, it may appear that your actual life is conspiring against your study habits, be it in the form of friends, family expectations, the monetary demands of living by yourself, etc. Soon enough, you are taken completely off course and only remember your goal when some time has passed. At this point, the goal itself may appear to be the enemy in your path. The winds of time never cease, and this cycle occurs for many a well-intentioned artist!
While online free content is a great supplement to a primary study path, it is hard to have it satiate you entirely. Instead, I would encourage students to lean towards the path that most closely replicates the old apprenticeship model that is very rare to find today. This involved finding someone working professionally in the field you are interested in entering, and learning from them. The dynamic of how this “learning from them” occurs is going to be different for each individual. The issue here is that if a professional has to help a younger apprentice to learn the ropes, it will slow down their workflow, even if they love teaching. This is why few professional artists want the extra labour of working with a younger artist.
You can obviously pay for education online, which is what we offer from PortPrep, and what others offer too. What you’re really paying for with any of these services is the accountability to produce regularly. We have found extremely high completion rates with our online courses, specifically because there is an extensive one-on-one component, and there is an exchange of money. I think both of these factors are the biggest contributions to our course completion rate, and thus to the college and university acceptance rates for our students. It is very tricky to replicate this model without these two factors, i.e. the accountability that accompanies personalised teaching, and the “skin in the game” which is the exchange of funds.
One day I hope to be “eating these words”, as I think there is great potential in the free online model, but I am no longer naïve to the low course follow-through rate.
What do you think about this conundrum? Please let us know in the comments!
