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 Social democratic priorities for education have been replaced by neoliberal ideology.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.
Past in the Present
This book explores how the past lives on in the present—specifically, how previous principles of social democracy have been co-opted under neoliberal criteria. Neoliberalism tries to hide its tracks as it advances its voracious transformation of society through appropriating terms, sites, processes, and resources from more progressive and democratic movements of the past. In effect, we often experience how remnants of progressivism are being used to cover up neoliberal mandates. In this way, the official documents associated with US-based Partnership for 21st Century Skills (Partnership for 21st Century Learning 2015) (P21 for short) reveal such an amalgam of the past fused with the present under late capitalism. Despite the powerful influence of neoliberal imperatives, the marriage of progressivism and neoliberalism in contemporary rhetoric of education, pedagogy, and curricular mandates offers opportunities for “new political antagonisms” (McRobbie 2016, p. 43), as I will delve into throughout this volume.
At this moment of transformation, creativity in particular is being reshaped and captured in a narrowed focus on innovation for the market. Beyond pointing out and contextualizing how this transformation is occurring, I also argue that our current experience of creativity education is a rich site for contestation of creativity’s takeover for the economic needs of the future workforce and a potential mode to take back the term for altered purposes. I make the claim that educators and members of society writ large have the moral obligation to seek more for their youth than mere economic advantage.
Infectious GERM
Throughout this volume, I use the term GERM, the acronym for Global Education Reform Movement . Coined by Pasi Sahlberg (2015), GERM refers to the global trend unifying national education policies and utilizing corporate management models to implement “competition between schools, standardization of teaching and learning, punitive test-based accountability, ill-informed performance-based pay, and data-driven decision-making” (p. 142). Emerging in the 1980s from outcomes-based education reform followed by standards-based education in the 1990s, this globalization of policy and practice in education has spread from the initial infection of English-speaking nations such as the United States and Western Europe (Sahlberg 2015). It largely encompasses an informal movement with a corresponding orthodoxy that standardized testing and homogenized curricula worldwide will improve student learning and school performance. As such,
Alas, according to Sahlberg (2015), despite the worldwide movement toward standards, “[n]one of the countries that joined (or were infected by) the GERM—the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, or Sweden—have been able to improve students’ learning” (pp. 150–151) according to standardized tests such as PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment).The National Curriculum in England in the 1990s, the New National Education Standards in Germany in the 2010s, and the Common Core State Standards in the United States are examples of attempts to bring coherence and quality to teaching and learning in all schools. (Sahlberg 2015, p. 145)
Nevertheless, GERM is reinforced in a 2015 report by the World Economic Forum titled New Vision of Education (World Economic Forum 2015) that collated and analyzed international testing results in relation to the needs of economic performance in the global economy. The World Economic Forum proclaimed a disconnect between countries around the world whose economies increasingly run on innovation , collaboration , and creativity, while these countries’ educational systems still narrowly focus on foundational skills of literacy and numeracy. In line with the market-oriented principles associated with GERM, the report defined creativity as “the ability to imagine and devise innovative new ways of addressing problems, answering questions or expressing meaning through the application, synthesis or repurposing of knowledge” (World Economic Forum 2015, p. 3). The report envisions creativity as a competency in the workforce essential to the global economy, needing to be successfully implemented and assessed in the educational efforts of economically competitive nations. In this context, creativity is being lassoed and professionalized for economic impact. This marks a refinement of GERM as it pivots in the name of globalized capitalism to tighten the grip of economic rationality on educational policy.
Correspondingly, GERM has been
P21 is no exception, as it is composed of over 30 corporate partners including Intel Corporation and the Ford Motor Company. While it may be easily argued that fewer and fewer schooling environments within the United States can possibly meet these standards, P21 mandates provide a context for a case study of the contemporary conceptualization of the economization of art and creativity education.promoted through the strategies and interests of multinational private corporations, supranational development agencies, international donors, private foundations, and consulting firms through their interventions in national education reforms and policymaking processes around the world. (Sahlberg 2015, p. 143)
P21
For over a decade, P21, in collaboration with employers, policymakers, and educators, has concentrated its efforts on advocating for students to be better prepared for “college, career, and citizenship readiness” (Partnership for 21st Century Skills n.d., p. 5). As Dilley, Kaufman, Kennedy, and Plucker (n.d.) articulate, P21
recognizes that all learners need educational experiences in school and beyond, from cradle to career, to build knowledge and skills for success in a globally and digitally interconnected world. Representing over 5 million members of the global workforce, P21 unites business, government and education leaders from the U.S. and abroad to advance evidence-based education policy and practice and to make innovative teaching and learning a reality for every child. (...