Find Your Folk

Why do we learn to write, paint, play music, code? Why do we bother trying to understand difficult ideas and turn that understanding into new work?

Our culture of virality and fame suggests that we make work to make it big. We're told by educational institutions that they're developing cultures of "excellence," and that idea of excellence is represented to us as landing big jobs (at google or amazon) or finding a massive audience.

But most of us will never do any of this; and even if we did, it wouldn't make us happy. So what if, instead, the goal of making things were simply to find meaning in the world around us?

We're joined in this episode by Lisa Rathje, Executive Director of Local Learning: The National Network for Folk Arts in Education; Jean Tokuda Irwin, Arts Education Manager for the Utah Division of Arts and Museums; and Keith Taylor, author and A.L. Becker Collegiate Lecturer in English, Emeritus, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.