Today, the Hayward Gallery is opening its "Wide Open School" — not an art school per se but a "school run by artists." The month-long project involves classes and workshops by the likes of Thomas Hirschhorn, Tomás Saraceno, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, among a hundred other art luminaries. Although alternative education systems are nothing new, the "Wide Open School" is painfully topical in Britain at a time when the coalition government has tripled university fees and is threatening to push art completely out of the national school curriculum.

Education and participation have always been issues particularly close to Bob & Roberta Smith's heart. As the artist was preparing for his intervention at the "Wide Open School," he talked to ARTINFO UK about his newly launched Art Party of the USA, philosopher Hannah Arendt, and the need for artists to get vocal.

Could you tell me about the origin of the Art Party of the USA?

It is an idea to better articulate why art is important, and to gather a forum of people who can feel strong about talking to the government about it. I've set up a Web site, which has articles I wrote for the Guardian and a letter to [Secretary of State for Education] Michael Gove. The situation now — if the EBaac [English Baccalaureate] goes forward and the national curriculum gets more and more diminished — is that the schools, even primary schools, won't have to teach art, which I think is disgraceful. Wealthy kids who go to private schools will be taught art, but this is saying to kids in inner cities: "don't waste your time doing that, you'll never do anything." If one thinks of people like Damien Hirst, Michael Landy, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas — the exciting thing about their art has been seeing their battle with the art establishment. If you just have rich people making art, there's no battle. It becomes very decorative, and also a little bit meaningless.

The idea of the Art Party of the USA is to say all these things very bluntly to all governments, not just the Conservative government, but to future governments: the culture of the country, and its ability to design and imagine the world, will be diminished if you don't teach art. The Art Party of the USA won't be a political party, because I want it to be cross-party. I think art is common to all people whether they are conservative or left wing. I don't really care about that, it's art that I care about.

Why the title?

I launched the Art Party of the USA at the Pierogi Gallery in New York. In the USA in the 1930s, at a time of incredible depression and recession, Roosevelt said: What we are going to do is to give people hope by inventing this thing called the "Works Progress Administration." It was all sorts of things, but a lot of it involved artists like Jackson Pollock. It was trying to acknowledge the fact that art can provide hope, that it can be very progressive in its thinking in terms of the economy, and give a focus to the country. If you cut the arts, it's like pushing the lever down on the airplane — preaching austerity just crashes the whole economy. Although Americans don't actually put a lot of public money into the art, art is part of the story of hope in the United States, whereas here it's something people feel they can do without, like it's a luxury, which I think is nonsensical.

To what extent could the Hayward Gallery's "Wide Open School" be seen as a flagship for some of the ideas you've been promoting with the Art Party of the USA?

I do think it's the moment to think about education, what we value about it, how it is delivered, what it's about, who it's for, and what we want it to be. The thing I like about education is not teaching everybody the same thing at the same moment in the day. What I like is universality. I like the sense in which education is a ladder for people to climb and understand the world, and that ladder needs to reach down to everybody. Those are the sorts of thing that I want to push forward.

One of the things about the art world is that you think about it as a kind of open space where anything can happen, and it is, but because it is so open, to make any sense of it what people tend to do is to create ghettos and hierarchies. I think the spirit of the "Wide Open School" is to inspect all of that and just say: "Art is art, and all that is nonsense!" You can encourage people to be involved in art in all sorts of different ways, for lots of different purposes.

At the "Wide Open School", you've got different classes: "Symphony for the Public Realm," "Just What Is it That Makes Today's Public Spaces So Different, So Appealing," and a last session which includes a "proposal for intervention." What do you hope to achieve with these classes?

It's about my fears about London turning into a big gated community, really, and again, trying to stress the universal aspect of ideas and thinking. One of the key people that I've grown to love quite recently is the German philosopher Hannah Arendt. She said that freedom was public, participatory, and about intervention. So why I wanted to try and do is to think about public space, in the light of Hannah Arendt, and also in the light of the increasing corporatization of public space. Public space isn't about just squares and streets, it's also about education, and universities, and about health services and all of those things. So it's trying to re-imagine, and re-think what public space could mean in the future.

Another starting point is Richard Hamilton's collage "Just What is it That Makes Today's Homes so Different, so Appealing?" (1958), and its relation to "public space." Home is about private space, a space where one closes the door on the outside world, which is a good thing on some levels, but you can't have a consumer society without a home, because you have to take all these things that you buy and display them, or put them to use somewhere. So the whole idea of the home I see as a slightly double-edged sword: It's the catalyst for the whole of privatization and consumerism and I wanted to subvert that.

You've always been very vocal and politically engaged, whether on the Tate's sponsorship, or on art schools. But it seems that in the last few years, other artists are also becoming increasingly vocal, speaking out against the art funding cuts or NHS reform. Do you feel that there's a shift in the way artists are viewing their own role in society?

The art world does quite well out of very wealthy people and extreme wealth and I think that has made artists quite silent about things. Now, you can see that there are real problems and artists really should take on the mantle that they had in the 1930s and say: "There is a future, and the future can be exciting. There is hope." It doesn't have to be overtly polemical, it can't be a very visual argument.

I think it's an interesting moment. Tracey Emin, although she supported the Conservatives, has been a very vocal advocate of art. People see her as a very powerful, political face for women in art and making the personal political — which is a very 1970s feminist thing. There is something that's changing and that's really to the good. I think artists should be braver and less fearful about telling the government, or the public, what they do, what they are about and what they are supporting. You've got to tell people. The idea of allowing primary and secondary schools not to teach art, and not to have art rooms is absolutely disgusting. I don't understand why more artists aren't on that bandwagon, because I think that's just fundamental. Everybody can unite around that. What Michael Gove is doing to the education system is just appalling. 

"Wide Open School," June 11 - July 11, 2012, Hayward Gallery, London.