IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL SUNNY DAY, THE KIND OF day that makes even the York University campus--a cross between a strip-mall and a suburban high school--seem appealing. But once inside the dark cloistered building with its fluorescent lights, tiny airless rooms and long tables arranged in a square, the outside world fell away. Which was appropriate, since I had come to speak to a class about creative writing: a thing so marginal, so strange, so difficult to put into words, we might as well have been in a different universe.

Half the students didn't show up. Why would they? It was a rare hot spring day and the visiting writer they had never heard of wasn't to be on the final exam. Those who came were shy, not particularly loquacious and interested in an almost embarrassed way.

The hour went by slowly. After 50 minutes of fielding questions about how to write a novel, how to make a living as a fiction writer, how to self-publish, even I was sick of my own prevarications: well you could do this, or you could do that, but then again, you could do this. Look, I wanted to tell them, in my entire life I have never planned for anything to happen to me, nor do I have any good advice to impart. I am a writer--combination dreamer and whiner--not a career planner, and certainly not a teacher (though if you have a position open on your faculty, I'm only too willing to pretend).

Still, the questions--like the endless waves of aspiring MFAS--do not go away. Riding the bus home, I indulged myself by lamenting the loss of the dreamers, freaks, cretins and weirdos who turned to art, not so they could become content providers for voracious international storchouses, but out of romantic individualism: I will lie in the gutter and paint with my own vomit and nothing can stop me, so powerful is my vision!

If nothing else, it was a convenient way to distract myself from the guilt I always feel when I am invited to visit or lecture or speak in some educative capacity. Should I decline, knowing as I do that no visiting artist, degree, or class will bring you any closer to the creation of an enduring masterpiece? Or should I go and do my best to teach those things that circle around art, what may be called the industry (in my case, the publishing industry with its confusing array of zinesters, micro publishers and voracious world spanning conglomerates)?

What lie should I tell the upturned faces of the students? I could tell them that all they need is enduring passion, and everything will turn out all right--unless of course their passion comes in the form of a burning in the belly that can only be quenched by gin. Or I could tell them to wait their turn, work hard, learn the ropes, supplicate themselves to the gods of industry and, again, everything will turn out all right. (Yes, you too could become an underpaid editor at some horrible magazine that marries recipes and lingerie spreads with the genre of fiction Oprah pioneers--the self-help confessional). I don't know what they want to hear, and I don't know what they need to hear.

This, I fear, is not only my problem, but the problem of arts education in general. It is true that you can now receive an education in the cultural industry of your choice, but no one is really sure exactly what that education should be comprised of, or train you to do. This eventually begins to gnaw at both the educator and educatee. Teaching art has always been problematic, which is why so many novels written by aging famous writers are set on college campuses. These books invariably involve thinly disguised narrators desperately trying to reclaim their artistic potency by pursuing co-eds, drinking too much and publicly insulting their faculty heads.

SOME TIME AGO, I WAS APPROACHED TO ANswer questions about my function as a productive individual with the profession of writer. My answers were then put up on a website funded by the government. I was in the writing and publishing category. Though my answers were about as useful as a tax cut in a global recession, my presence on the site alongside the other ``experts'' in the fields of movie-making and dancing was based on this central premise: that culture is a career to be assessed for its potential benefits and negatives. Simply read the material, hear from the experts and decide if you wish to be a composer or a folk-art muralist. Hey, if you can get the credentials and it pays out, do both! Apparently, we need no longer concern ourselves with such issues as substance, passion or even talent. Who needs talent? Even the talented don't always need talent to succeed, as indicated by the paintings of Joni Mitchell, the poems of Paul McCartney and the novels of Britney Spears.

In fact, the practice of teaching art as a skill set for aspiring entrepreneurs has become ubiquitous in recent years. Consider the series of booklets, collectively titled Careers in Culture, produced by our government in partnership with something called the Cultural Human Resources Council. Their purpose is ``to guide individuals wishing to embrace a career in the cultural sector.'' The booklets cover everything from writing and publishing to ``Careers in Film, Television, Radio and the Live Performing Arts.'' If anyone has any question as to who they are intended for, the special resource kit for guidance counselors should quickly end debate. One imagines an overwrought budding young sculptor sent sobbing to the counselor who has only to drop a handful of leaflets on the desk before the path to success once again becomes clear!

A report tabled by the Ontario Arts Council (OAC) called ``Making the Case for Arts Education,'' states that ``The arts help develop vital higher level skills. To succeed in the workplace and in our changing society, people must develop higher level skills, including creativity, problem-solving, the ability to communicate in different ways, self-discipline, tolerance and critical thinking.'' To be fair, we know that the beleaguered OAC was simply trying to formulate the kind of argument that even a deficit-obsessed golf pro could comprehend. Still, this kind of language is frighteningly pervasive.

Robert Kavanagh, director and academic dean of the new-agey quasi-college the White Mountain Academy of the Arts in Elliot Lake, Ontario recently wrote in The Globe and Mail that ``Artists are ideal candidates for entrepreneurial activity... Artists are terrific problem-solvers who bring together disparate variables and integrate them: from insight to design, from plan to implementation and then on to the creation of real things. In their making, they adapt their actions as circumstances and insights change.'' Bring me your problems, world, I am an artist and I will solve them!

While this image--artists as budding entrepreneurs, and arts education as an invaluable training ground for business success--seems bizarre, it's important to note that artists have always grappled with these kinds of contradictions. In our society, artists may be seen as post-modern gurus freed of such earthly concerns as profit, but they have always sought fame and fortune--evidence of the worth of their life's work. And, just as pervasive as the myth of the artist in the gutter is the myth of the artist in the gutter whose musical about being a starving artist in the big city is discovered two days after he's died a lonely death a perpetual reminder of the gulf that often separates achievement from success.

EVEN IF WE ACCEPT THE FACT THAT AN EDUcation in the arts can help you be productive in society (``At the very least,'' desperate parents implore their rapidly aging hipster children, ``get your MFA, so you have teaching to fall back on''), most of us still would like to see the arts taught as a thing unto itself. White Mountain, like most art schools, offers a high-end fine arts education where you are given the space and encouragement to discover your voice and muse. The fact that the school also wants to teach you how to turn that voice into pure hard cash only serves to suggest the extent to which we are conflicted about what an artist is, and how such a creature may be educated.

What I didn't tell the class at York was that, at the end of the day, we must still face the prospect of ``the work-place.'' And if we succeed because we can quote Byron at our job interview, should we regret the fact that we didn't decide to become career poets? Perhaps we should simply check off the requisite box on our what-my-arts-education-did-for-me government questionnaire and get the fuck on with our lives as personnel managers at the Canadian branches of multinational companies headquartered in Atlanta. (We can always write poetry in our office with the door closed--Kafka and Cavafy got their start that way!)

I still have no idea what to tell those who invite me--who pay me!--to educate them in the mysterious ways of the artist. I know that the crazy artist in the gutter is the worst kind of cliche, and yet part of me believes it--didn't Van Gogh cut his ear off, didn't Joyce go very hungry, didn't Woolf walk into the dark night of waves? It's all true. And yet I am as powerless to understand why they did those things as I am to explain how they went about changing the world with their muses. Even so, I will continue to plaster a smile on my face and head out to classrooms. I will do so because, like me, I know the students are drawn to art, not arts education. Like me, they come to art--stripped of its true worth, taught with the relentless fervour of parents encouraging children to eat their broccoli--for all the wrong reasons.

Artists may be seen as post-modern gurus freed of such earthly concerns as profit, but they have always sought fame and fortune.