This weekend, as I was scrolling through Facebook, I was shocked to see the announcement that Ken Robinson had passed away peacefully surrounded by his family after a brief battle with cancer. My heart sank and I felt quite incredulous as I kept thinking of Ken, our friendship, and how this man, by accident or fate, came to play a major role in my life, after I first met him back in 1991 at the University of Warwick.

I had the privilege to know, work with, and call Ken a friend. Rather than an obituary, here I would prefer to share my memory of this experience and celebrate him as a man I knew.

I knew Ken for just under a decade between 1991, when I first set foot at Warwick University’s then Department of Arts Education as a graduate student, and 2000, when I left Warwick, then as an academic, to take up a new post at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen.

As head of department Ken accepted me as a student, and then hired me as a colleague. Ken was our boss – ‘our’ meaning the arts education colleagues at Warwick. In many ways he was our best ally and leader, as we fought to keep the arts not only in what was then Warwick’s Institute of Education, but also to keep the arts in schools.

After a long battle with Tory administrations which systematically decimated the arts over decades, it was then the turn to take the battle to Tony Blair’s administration. While Labour was all for the arts, the battle to keep the arts in schools never saw any resolution – even when Blair anointed Ken as the ‘arts Tzar’ and commissioned him to conduct a year-long consultation which resulted in All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture, and Education (The Robinson Report) published in 1998.

The 1990s were exciting times. When I arrived at Warwick, Robinson was head of a vibrant Arts Education Department, with an arts portfolio that covered all levels, from teacher education with a robust creative arts provision, to an open and interdisciplinary graduate programme. The department’s central philosophy was that of sustaining discrete arts disciplines while developing arts education as an open interdisciplinary space that would extend itself to emerging disciplines like cultural studies. This was an approach that had then emerged in Britain following in the footsteps of luminaries like Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall.

Here one needs to add an historical context to British education, which was marked by decades of struggle and advocacy to sustain an equitable provision. What was perhaps more unique in arts education as conceived by Ken and his colleagues, was the idea that an equitable educational provision would succeed only when diversity was sustained by the arts. Basically, the argument was (and remains) that no real equity and emancipation will be gained without the active presence of the arts in schools.

Everyone wanted the arts to stay, but when the cuts came, the arts would be the first to go- John Baldacchino

The 1990s were also the tail end of bitter battles, such as those fought against Margaret Thatcher’s cuts in education. By then Thatcher was gone, while John Major became her uncomfortable heir. But the battle for education would never end, especially where the arts were concerned.

Then, Ken was better known as the guy who edited the Gulbenkian Report, known as The Arts in Schools first published in 1982. In his 1989 introduction, he renders a worrying picture of the arts in education. He states that “the problems facing the arts in schools are still profound, and in some respects are worsening. There is nothing in the new situation to prevent schools making fuller provision than previously for the arts, and some schools will. The concern is that schools could equally well choose to pare provision for the arts to the statutory minimum, and some schools will.”

This characterised Ken’s call to dedicate his life for the arts in education. Then as now, the worry has always been constant. With all the pressures they have to sustain, schools would push their arts provision to a minimum. That is what happened, even when everyone – from politicians to parents, from headteachers to CEOs – will always tell you that the arts should have a place in schools.

By 2000, we realised that the fate of the arts in our own department was reaching its end. It was what Ken predicted back in the 1980s. Everyone wanted the arts to stay, but when the cuts came, the arts would be the first to go.

After Warwick, Ken went on to become a very well-known name on the circuit of speakers for the arts. There he inspired so many, first by those famous TED talks, which are still shared on social media, and then with his bestsellers.

However, as Prof. Robinson – the Ken I knew and worked with – he was the arts education advocate and leader who worked within the system where he sustained a long enduring fight, for which the Blair administration elevated him to a Knighthood. As Sir Ken, he became a public intellectual and arts activist, appealing to a global audience which came to know him in different ways than how, those of us ‘in the sector’, would always cherish his memory. It is this wonderful combination of an academic and public dedication to the arts in education which is  Ken’s major legacy.

As to ‘Our Ken’, I keep reminding myself of how he came a long way from his humble origins.

A young lad from Liverpool, one of seven children in a working-class family whose father was severely disabled by an industrial accident, he overcame all the hardships that life threw at him, including polio at the age of four.

In the north of England, to call someone ‘our’ is to adopt a term of endearment. Ken is, in many ways, also ‘our’ in how arts practitioners and arts educators regard him as one of their own as well as one of their most cherished advocate, leader and inspirer. Just looking at social media, I am simply amazed by how many have paid tribute to Sir Ken from all over the world, and how many are mourning his untimely demise. It is in this spirit that here I am sharing my thoughts with you.

I will always miss Ken, just as I will always remain inspired by his gentlemanly, generous and optimistic view of the world.

John Baldacchino is Professor of Arts Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.