As The North Wall Arts Centre marks ten years since it first opened, theatre director Michael Attenborough CBE explains why studying the arts is the key to a civilised future

THE North Wall is a noble and enlightened exception to the frequent denial of what I believe to be a fundamental human right for young people. The right to artistically express themselves, to realise their creative potential.

Inside every individual is creativity waiting to be tapped, to be stimulated, to be expressed. It represents our very humanity.

All too often we are simply passive receivers of the arts. But nothing is more guaranteed to give us a sense of identity, self-confidence and self-esteem than the opportunity to express ourselves. Such creativity is hardwired into our DNA. Any small child will draw, paint, scribble, perform, dance invent, imagine and play without inhibition or self-consciousness. But what happens to this impulse?

Our education system is failing lamentably.The Government is not only cutting back on arts and humanities departments in higher education and forcibly removing the arts from the national curriculum, they are actively discouraging young people from studying the arts at all. The result is we are breeding generations of young people who feel alienated, disenfranchised, frustrated and angry. We are neglecting, at our peril, the invisible part of the nation’s health – our emotional, psychological and spiritual selves. This is very dangerous, but not entirely unexpected. Art provokes, asks uncomfortable questions, challenges received assumptions and refuses to accept black and white whilst exploring infinite shades of grey. It points a light into the dim and distant corners of our lives and of our world.

I was recently smuggled into Belarus – the last dictatorship in Europe – to work underground in Minsk with the Belarus Free Theatre on Shakespeare. Before we started I asked each member what it was that, above all else, motivated them to put themselves at such considerable personal risk. They all, in their different ways, gave the same reply – an irresistible, fundamental human need to express themselves.

In this country we live in a ‘free’ democracy, and yet the vast majority of our young people are denied this human right. The imperative to communicate. We must protest at this denial of our children’s freedom. We have to oppose the great god materialism and the siren call of commodity fetishism and insist that our culture is our birthright.

The marginalization and trivialization of the arts and the inadequacies of our education system are of course not as dreadful as the censorship and repression imposed by dictatorships such as in Belarus. It would be sentimental to claim they are. But, whilst actively campaigning against such regimes, we would do well to take a long hard look at ourselves and address this insidious, daily removal of freedom of choice here at home.

Those who built and now support this wonderful arts centre understand this. They understand the true meaning of the word 'education', derived from the Latin, to lead out (not to cram in). We are, after all, creating future citizens of the world, a world all too desperately in need of unity and peace. Without the ability to communicate and indeed to empathize, which are the natural consequences and benefits of the arts, this will never happen. 400 years ago, Thomas Kyd, a playwright contemporary with Shakespeare, wrote 'Where words prevail not, violence prevails'.

The Arts and our right to express ourselves lie at the centre of what humanises and civilises us and may just hold the key to our future.

Michael Attenborough CBE