The risk of sports became very real to me personally when I saw a boy’s neck get snapped in football practice when I was in high school. I had to ask myself, “Why did he put himself at such risk?” For that matter, why did we all? The answer is very simple: We struggled and risked injury in practice for the chance to play in the game.

The game. That’s when it mattered. At the games the crowd cheered. At the game scores mattered. At the game each catch, tackle and yard gained or lost went into the record books. Some of the better athletes earned scholarships by what happened in the game. But not by what was done at practice. Practice didn’t count. A ninety-nine-yard touchdown, no matter how spectacular, did not get recorded in practice. Without the games, there would be no need for practice. There would be no desire for practice. Indeed, without the games there would be no practice.

The psychological underpinning of this is important. It explains why we prepare — not just for sports— but for anything. It explains why we learn. It explains why we don’t learn. Effort, in short, must be tied to a compelling purpose.

This is where our public education system runs into problems.

In an effort to tie learning to purpose, high school was presented by my teachers as the academic practice for the game — college. Learning in high school didn’t count except as a means to get to the higher education that did count. There was no other reason presented to learn chemistry, biology, Spanish, or algebra. This was never the intention of the public school system, but is an unintended byproduct of the university system’s power to award credentials.

Why the education system is the way it is
The first high school, named the English Classical High School, was established in Boston in 1821. It was established, not to prepare students for a university education but as a result of a university education’s limitations. In Public Education in America, Cressman (my great grandfather, by the way) and Benda write about the university system that:

1. It was not making secondary education available to all youth.
2. The curriculum was not practical enough to meet the changing times
3. It was necessary for too many children to leave their homes and board at or near the academy they wished to attend.
4. It was not an extension of the public school system but rather something separate from it.

The chief purpose of the first high school was not as a prerequisite for college, but was to “fit [students] for active life or qualify them for eminence in private or public station.” Universities responded to this apparent competition. To return to my great grandfather’s book, the authors write” It became clear, however, as the years were passing that the function of college preparation was becoming a controlling factor. The colleges through their entrance requirements, it was alleged, were dominating the entire high school program.”

Because colleges control the credentialing process, they can make students go through an inherently expensive process to achieve a particular credential. Even if a high school teaches the exact same class that a college teaches, it cannot award college credit for it. The fact that a student would get the same thing intellectually out of either class is irrelevant in the current system. The system is based, not on what is actually best for the student, but rather on what is best for the university’s survival.

Cressman and Benda write that “Education is preparation for life.” In other words, life is the game, and education how we practice for it. Through positioning, and the controlling of credentialing, universities have rewritten the maxim to mean “higher education is preparation for life; high school is preparation for higher education.” In this manner, universities have limited access to the game to only to those who could afford it.

Cressman and Benda go on to say that “The goal of public education should be to make the best of education available to every child on completely equal terms.” Completely equal terms — if we take this as a given, then we must recognized that or current system is tragically failing children on the low end of the socioeconomic ladder.

I’m very careful in my writing to focus on the benefits of learning instead of the importance of any particular credential. Tying effort to purpose can dramatically change a student’s academic achievement. I’ve been through this personally. I went from nearly straight ‘F’s in high school when I thought college was unattainable due to expense, to straight ‘A’s in college using my G.I.Bill benefits. Having the perspective of experiencing the psychological effects of being excluded from the game, and then overcoming it, I believe that the problem of hopelessness in our education system is rampant, but also entirely solvable. Here’s how:

The solution
The first thing to do is digitally record the lectures of the best teachers in the public education system. With several million teachers employed by tax dollars there is valuable instruction that, once recorded, posted and organized, could produce the best online university the world has ever seen. As long as there is enough diversity in the schools to ensure schools are not all teaching the exact same thing, just about anything worth learning could be taught that didn’t require special equipment or materials (like an airplane for instance, or cadaver in medical school).

The second thing to do is alter the accreditation/credentialing system. Currently, schools go through their accreditation process and the award their own credentials. There seems to me to be a middleman here that adds expense to the system that is unnecessary. People should learn however they choose, then have their skills validated through a process of review, evaluation or examination that awards credit for a particular block of learning. This should be done by third-party institutions, not the schools where the learning is acquired. The major required expense then, would be for testing, which is much cheaper than attending a school with all its related expenses. CLEP exams are an example of how this could be accomplished. CLEP exams award college credit by testing students for knowledge regardless of where the student acquired the knowledge. If the program is expanded to include a wider array of subjects, the education expense on a per student basis could go down dramatically.

This will restore balance between what a high school education could be and what the university system is.

If all credentialing is conducting by a third party, the collective public education system could compete with universities. Each high school would need to offer only a few college level courses, and pool those courses online, for this to be effective. Right now, I know of a high school in Herndon Virginia that teaches the same computer courses I spent about $15,000 of my GI Bill benefit on. I have college credit for my effort, and the high school students in Herndon do not. In the system I’m proposing this would change.

To not change this is to regulate high school to being nothing more than a four-year admissions process for college. The consequence will be persistently high drop out rates among those without hope of attending college. This is as predictable as it is changeable.

The third thing to do is adapt Nicholas Negroponte’s one laptop per child program to the both U.S. and foreign markets. The old model brings the student to the education. This is based on inefficient (and therefore expensive) ideas relating to geography and oral history. The new model of education brings education to the student, wherever the student may live.

Is art not taught in your school in Arkansas? No problem. You could learn from the art class in New York, or Georgia, or any number of places. Missed school due to illness or a family emergency? No problem. Log online to get caught up. Drop out of high school, but are too old to go back? No problem. Study online to learn what you missed. Want to learn from the best teachers from the past? No problem, as long as the instruction has been recorded. Because education would always be available, it would become a way of life.

This is bigger than providing education to children. This is bigger than providing education to Americans. The technology and resources exist to provide education to the entire world, cheaply and efficiently. This could have a profound impact on nothing less than world peace and prosperity. The technology is in place to start this without spending a dime. It’s simply a matter of will. Once started the funds required to get laptops to children pail in comparison to what current college education costs are. The average college student needs over $25,000 per year to attend college. For a four-year degree that is more than $100,000. With laptops in Negroponte’s program costing $200, we can bring education to 500 students in the new system for the cost of bringing one student to the current education system.

Just like when high schools arrived on the scene, a new system like this would make universities feel uneasy. I have two responses to this:

1. Who cares? If a college must rely on the weight of its credentialing power instead of the quality of its instruction, it deserves to be resigned to the dust-bins of history.
2. The best universities would adapt. While fewer students would be looking for end-to-end solutions via four-year intensive programs, more students would take a life-long approach to learning. Colleges would adapt to this lifelong model and would likely attract students who take fewer classes a year, but attend for many more years than the average current student. Great teachers will always attract good students, and colleges will always likely be a place where collaborators seek each other out.

It’s important to note that not every skill needs a credential. Art skill, for instance, is easily evaluated by those without special training, and therefore requires no credential. The artist’s portfolio is the principle means of finding work, not a degree. The best artists will get the work, regardless of credential. This provides us with a model of a school that does not rely on its credentialing power to attract students.

The Art Student’s League in New York has always understood the importance of learning over credentialing. It has never awarded degrees. Yet among its alumni are Norman Rockwell, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Al Hirschfeld, Andrew Loomis, Howard Pyle and Will Eisner. Can anyone really picture the editor of the Saturday Evening Post saying to Rockwell, “These paintings are really great Norman, but I’ll need to see a degree just to make sure.” I think not. His ability was evident to all and therefore required no credential.

The Art Student’s League is the model for the kind of schools that would succeed if credentialing were separated from the learning institution. A school would have to focus solely on the quality of its instruction to attract students. On the website, the executive director of the Art Students League explains the school’s guiding philosophy:

Another important aspect of the League’s philosophy of training artists is that the path to becoming a professional artist is one that is carved out by each individual student. The League is not accredited and offers no degrees. No curriculum is dictated. What is provided is a learning environment in which each student, through practice and perseverance and a commitment to learning, can realize his or her full potential as an artist in whatever amount of time they require.

This philosophy would have to be adopted by the university system in order to survive. Not awarding degrees has not hampered the Art Students League’s survivability in the market, nor has it diminished its prestige, which is great.

Moving credentialing to third-party institutions would independently verify the instruction of first-rate schools. This would enhance the reputation of good schools not diminish them. It would also verify the learning of first-rate students of from all walks of life, schools or methods of learning. Not only would the playing field be leveled, but for the first time, everyone would be invited to the field of play. Once invited to the game, students previously excluded from it would start practicing for it. That means learning on a scale we’ve never seen. That would be a game for the ages.

I’m reading the autobiography that Norman Rockwell dictated to his son. Here is one of the passages that I highlighted regarding the effort required for greatness:

I wanted to be a great illustrator. I was so dedicated and solemn that the other students called me “The Deacon.” The lunchroom crowd, students who wore beards and soft wide-brimmed hats and chatted about art all day long over cups of coffee in the lunchroom, regarded me with a mixture of scorn and awe. One of them said to me once, “You know, if I worked as hard as you do I could be as good as Velasquez.” I just asked, “Why don’t you?”

Matt Archambault recently introduced me to illustrator Alphonse Mucha (1860-1930). Mucha was an amazing artist that I’m very surprised to have never heard of before. I recognized his influence, though, in comics today — most notably in the work of Adam Hughes.

Apparently Mucha’s talent didn’t completely surface early in his life. Here is a tidbit I found on the Mucha Foundation website:

1878
Mucha applies to the Prague Academy of Fine Arts. His application is turned down with the recommendation: “Find yourself another profession where you’ll be more useful.”

One of my favorite artists, Andrew Loomis, had a similar experience. In Figure Drawing for All It’s Worth, Loomis writes:

May I confess that two weeks after entering art school, I was advised to go back home? That experience has made me much more tolerant of an inauspicious beginning than I might otherwise have been, and it has given me additional incentive in teaching.

If academies and universities are such poor judges of potential, why don’t we just assume potential exists in everyone? Instead of looking for evidence of talent, we would do well to look for a willingness to make an extreme effort.

Loomis goes on to write:

I not only assume that my reader is interested in drawing but that he wishes from his toes up to become an efficient and self-supporting craftsman. I assume that the desire to express yourself with pen and pencil is not only urgent but almost undeniable, and that you feel you must do something about it. I feel that talent means little unless coupled with an insatiable desire to give an excellent personal demonstration of ability. I feel also that talent must be in company with a capacity for unlimited effort, which provides the power that eventually hurdles the difficulties that would frustrate lukewarm enthusiasm.

The first days of my algebra 2 class in high school were easy. I remember Mrs. Davis up at the board going over the lessons, and thinking, “when do we get to the interesting stuff?” Then I went to sleep.

A semester or two later I woke up, looked up at the board and thought, “What the hell is she talking about?” She made no sense to me. Somewhere between those easy first classes and the ones later in the year, the class got hard — at least for me. Those who paid attention found the classes later in the year just as easy as in the beginning of the year.

The key to unlocking the complexity of a subject is to understand that there are layers and layers of simplicity that need to be digested in the correct order. Jump ahead or skip early lessons at your own risk.

I’ve skipped some of the easy stuff in art. I’ve tried to work around it as best I can, but it’s much easier to just go back and learn the basic material.

Below is an exercise recommended by Ernest Watson in his book Creative Perspective. He recommends drawing cubes freehand (without plotting vanishing points) to get a feel for how they look. After all, a box is easy to draw in perspective, but a perfect cube takes some practice. Since a cube is a basic unit of measure for proportion in perspective and since the ability to draw squares in perspective is essential to being able to draw circles in perspective, I’m taking Watson’s advice. He recommends 50 parts practice to one part theory.

This weekend I constructed six cubes out of bristol board for reference and plunged into the first picture. Forty-nine more to go.

Almost by definition, if you set an example worth following, you are leading. You don’t need to be in charge to set a good example. Nor do you need to hold a high position in an organization to set a good example. You simply have to understand what a good example would be and become it.

Being in charge does not always mean coming up with the best ideas. Sometimes it means recognizing the best example set in a group and following it regardless of who set it.

My daughter sets a good example. She doesn’t attempt things — she attacks them. When something gets hard for her, she just gets more determined. She’s only six but we could all learn from an example like hers.

Recently she picked up on some of the perspective instruction I’ve been reviewing. I didn’t intend to teach it to her yet because I would have thought her too young to understand. She is proving me wrong on that count. She was single handedly going through enough paper doing exercises like the one below to make a forest cringe. My wife got her a chalkboard/whiteboard easel to save a tree or two.

She is dedicated to figuring perspective out. She was the same way when she was learning to read. Watching her struggle through the early stages was painful at times. Sounding out every single word was a major endeavor. Simply reading the word “the” would take 15 to 20 seconds and would be pronounced wrong. It didn’t bother her that it was hard, or that it didn’t come naturally. She stuck with it and got better in imperceptible strides. Now, not surprisingly, she reads very well for her age.

As adults, we forget what it’s like to not be good at something. Kids, being new to everything, aren’t expert at anything. They have no comfort zones to cling to. We adults often do have comfort zones and we hide in them very well. No one wants to do something poorly, but when building a new skill we can choose to do it poorly for a while or not to do it at all. Too often, adults choose the “not at all” option.

Kids don’t though. My daughter doesn’t worry about perfection. She seems to understand the futility of that. When she shows me her latest drawing, or even throws a frisbee, she never asks if it is perfect. Instead she asks, “Was that my best one yet?”

Yesterday I told her I wanted to be like her when I grow up.

“But Daddy,” she said, “you are grown up.”

Yes. But as long as I follow her example, I’m not done growing.

I picked the wrong mascot for the picture when I drew this in pencil. Turner Hilliker colored this in and added the text.

We’re closing in on our 1000th unit logo. Here are a few projects we’re working on this week:

My grandfather, George Cressman, was one of mine:

Link: George Cressman; Modernized Weather Service Forecasting

The article neglects to mention what an avid runner he was. Even in his seventies he could run 7-minute miles for more than three miles — that’s as long as I could verify his time before he made a run drop of me. On formation runs, I would remind my Marines that my grandfather could do this so they shouldn’t have any problem. He was truly remarkable.

I wish I could sit down with a blank sheet of paper and project an image from my mind, like that from an opaque projector, onto the paper and trace it. Unfortunately it just doesn’t work that way. I have to yank the ideas out kicking and screaming against their will. Once on the paper, it still requires even more laborious coercion at the point of a pencil before the idea behaves the way I want it to. This post is a description of the process.

Concept
Nearly all of our designs are collaborations with Marines. Sometimes we get a detailed sketch and other times we just get a general description. For this sketch we received the following instruction from Cpl B, who is currently stationed in Iraq:

We are looking for a Devil Dog in a Trojan outfit much like the design on
your home page. The devil dog should be on one or maybe two 7-ton trucks as
if it was riding a chariot. The Operation for us is Operation Iraqi Freedom
8. It should say something like “Truckin it through Al Anbar Province” or
something like that.

Rough Sketch
Before I went too far, I wanted to make sure I was on the right track. This was a little like playing Pictionary. My goal here was to get the basic idea down to communicate with Cpl B my interpretation of his idea. I may do several of these before I come up with something that I like. Once submitted to Cpl B he was able to give his input. Here is the first rough. Sometimes, my roughs aren’t even this tight and look like little more than chicken scratch.

Working Out the Perspective
After I received feedback and suggestions, the next step was to work out the perspective of the vehicles. I have a good understanding of perspective so my initial sketches tend to be in the right ball park; however, for the final drawing I wanted the perspective to be a little more accurate. I put a scan of the image into Adobe Illustrator and worked out the specific perspective issues for this drawing. This picture was deceptively hard. I needed two trucks of the same proportion at different depths. Added to that I needed to pull the back truck off the same plane to give a jostling effect. This involved plotting vanishing traces, and ellipses to determine the exact arc of the vehicle. Perspective is a study unto itself. You can check out some resources on my Squidoo lens if you’re interested in picking up the skill:

Link: Learn to be an Illustrator on Squidoo

Getting Reference
It would be nice if I had a photographic memory; I would love to store accurate images in my mind of everything I’ve ever seen. Such is not the case. Since my initial drawings of the seven ton trucks where rather vague, I pulled some reference of seven ton trucks to study.

Understanding the Reference
Because I couldn’t find any truck in the exact position I needed it in, I needed to understand the reference, not just copy it. I did this by reverse engineering the basic shapes and proportions of the vehicle. It’s simpler than it sounds. I just traced the image and put it into a perspective grid to understand the proportions and construction.

Putting it all Together
This part was actually pretty easy. I printed out the perspective work form illustrator onto a large sheet of paper. Then I taped smooth bristol board to it and traced it on a light table. I gridded the perspective box to match the grid on my tracing and just worked the rest out. I wanted an element of caricature to the vehicles so I pulled and exaggerated the proportions wherever I saw fit.

That’s it. That’s the finished sketch. From here, the next step is ink it.

I did this for a friend, Joe, who owns a Smoothie King franchise. The text will say “Smoothie King: Where fruit goes to get whipped.” The store is in Harrisonburg, VA (right next to the Marine recruiter if you want to make two stops). It’s also across the street from James Madison University which has a bulldog for its mascot — quite a coincidence considering how many bulldogs I draw. I don’t know if Joe will do anything with it, but I thought it was fun to do: