The present English Governments assault on the arts in the education syllabus should remind us of Albert Camus defence of the Arts – and that Welsh miners saw the importance of education, including the Arts, as a means to emancipation – money they deducted from their weekly wage packets to pay for libraries nad edeucation.
“Tyrants know there is an emancipatory force, which is mysterious only to those who do not revere it. Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and this is its whole secret. And thousands of concentration camps and barred cells are not enough to hide this staggering testimony of dignity. This is why it is not true that culture can be, even temporarily, suspended in order to make way for a new culture. Man’s unbroken testimony as to his suffering and his nobility cannot be suspended; the act of breathing cannot be suspended”
Albert Camus ‘Creating Dangerously’ was a speech delivered at the University of Uppsala in Sweden in December 1957, a few days after Camus had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Celfypridd 