Inside the neoliberalism associated with late capitalism, inherent paradoxes are managed through reorienting all components of society including our values, ethics, relationships to culture, fears, and responsibilities so that the claim there is no alternative (TINA) is firmly established at every turn. Neoliberalism encompasses a fundamental belief in business and market-driven solutions aimed at societal problems facilitated through privatization and deregulation. This culture and ethic of entrepreneurialism and competition has become the guiding principle of our time, making neoliberalism a form of governmentality —an all-encompassing rationality for society that places every process, action, and behavior under economic measure in the service of market fundamentalism so that non-economic forms can be analyzed in regard to potential capital (including human intellectual capital) in the market economy—“a sort of economic analysis of the non-economic” (Foucault 2004/2008, p. 243). In this way, neoliberalism not only governs nations, states, groups, and individuals, but also works to control culture and education.

The Fordist era of the last century established unionized factory jobs in conjunction with the dominance of industrial production. The post-Fordist period, beginning in the late twentieth century and continuing to this day, indicates a move toward service-driven economies and globalization, away from the reliance on industrial production. This imperative has come to encompass conceptualizations of public education.

In order to ease this transition while enhancing economic competitiveness, schooling plays a role in preparing the world’s youth for employment . In my lifetime, education has transformed from its focus on the development of a democratic citizenry through critical thinking and social cohesion toward more individualistic concerns tied to the acquisition of useful skills for innovation in a global marketplace. Social democratic priorities for education have been replaced by neoliberal ideology. This radical redefinition has been under way in the United States and elsewhere over the last few decades, buttressed by a popular consensus across political parties and geographical regions that values public schooling for its contribution to the economy (Brown 2015; Saltman 2014; World Economic Forum 2015).

Within this context, creativity and its education are enduring a phase marked by inherent tensions. Under economic pressures and their associated austerity across the globe, it might seem inefficient, if not outright decadent, to defend creativity or visual arts education at this time. Perhaps ironically, Harris and Ammermann (2016) maintain that “[c]reativity is not only surviving but thriving in the current education environment, yet it may be creativity of an increasingly narrow kind” (p. 109). McWilliam and Haukka (2008) echo this claim that creativity is now at the center of education by declaring that “creativity is not garnish to the roast of industry or of education” as it is currently considered “a powerful economic driver, not simply the province of the arts and the hobbyist” (p. 651).

Disciplinary boundaries are being counteracted by moves to delegitimize knowledge once located at the amalgamation between creativity and art, while both are being incorporated within market-driven education policies. Art educators’ and art’s authority over and legitimacy concerning creativity are increasingly undermined, diluted, and belittled in the cause of neoliberalist capitalist economics. From the perspective of an art educator, this volume considers the broader strokes of what is at stake for creativity, art, and their associated educations related to our common futures. It makes an appeal for a reclaiming of creativity education liberated from professionalization and financialization under a purely economic rationality. I reflect on the wider values and mechanisms at play within societies aiming to mobilize creativity education for innovative economic goals and student employability. As the neoliberal embrace of creativity for market motives cuts other versions of creativity off at the pass, I delve into what the movement toward global educational reform risks losing in its particular financialized reinterpretations of creativity that may actually run counter to the stated goals of innovation. But in reclaiming creativity back from business , am I proposing an “anti-economy” of artists (Bourdieu 1993) or of creativity—the ultimate bohemian, romantic, unsustainable nirvana without a business plan? Not necessarily. I offer pathways for readers to extend in their own contexts and for their own purposes so that creativity and art might be recreated through education.