CREATIVITY, EDUCATION

AND THE ARTS

Series Editor: Anne Harris

THE
NEOLIBERALIZATION
OF CREATIVITY
EDUCATION
Democratizing, Destructing
and Decreating

Nadine M. Kalin
Creativity, Education and the Arts

Series editor
Anne Harris
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
This series emerges out of recent rapid advances in creativity- and arts-­
informed research in education that seeks to reposition creativity studies
within (and in conversation with) education as a multi- and interdisciplin-
ary field.

This series takes as its starting point the interrelationship between arts-
based research and a growing neuroscientific, cultural and economic dis-
course of creativity and creative industries, and the need for education to
play a larger role in these expanding discourses. It also takes as a priori an
invitation to creativity scholars to move more robustly into theorizing
the work of arts- and creativity-based research work, bridging a historical
gap between ‘science’ and ‘art’, between ‘theoretical’ and ‘applied’
approaches to research, and between qualitative and quantitative research
paradigms.

The following are the primary aims of the series:

• To publish creativity research and theory in relation to education

(including schools, curriculum, policy, higher education, pedagogy,
learning and teaching, etc.).
• To put education at the heart of debates on creativity, re-establish
the significance of creativity for learning and teaching and develop-
ment analyses, and forge links between creativity and education.
• To publish research that draws on a range of disciplinary and theo-
retical lenses, strengthening the links between creative and arts edu-
cation and geographies, anthropology, creative industries, aesthetics
and philosophy, history, and cultural studies.
• To publish creativity research and theory with an international scope
that explores and reflects the current expansion of thought and prac-
tice about global flows, cultural heritage, and creativity and the arts
in education.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14926
 Nadine M. Kalin

The Neoliberalization
of Creativity
Education
Democratizing, Destructing and Decreating
Nadine M. Kalin
Department of Art Education and Art History
University of North Texas
Denton, TX, USA

Creativity, Education and the Arts

ISBN 978-3-319-71524-7    ISBN 978-3-319-71525-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71525-4

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 Series Editor’s Introduction

Nadine Kalin’s new book makes a significant and welcome contribution to

my Creativity, Education and the Arts series at Palgrave. As always, I’m grate-
ful to the editors and particularly Eleanor Christie, the commissioning editor,
for supporting and nurturing this dynamic series, now in its third year.
Kalin’s text takes up where several others in the series have left off, this
time turning a more focused attention to economics and neoliberalism.
Building on the common foundation of (visual) art history, aesthetics the-
ory and art-specific education, Kalin challenges the commodification dis-
course around contemporary creative industries, a theoretical investigation
I addressed at length in The Creative Turn (2014) and which has deeply
informed the basis of this series more broadly. Writing from an American
post-Fordist economic analysis and perspective, Kalin challenges the neo-
liberal ideology that she feels over-influences contemporary conversations,
institutionalisations and curricular formalisations of creativity in educa-
tion. Deploying Agemben’s notion of decreation, Kalin calls on activists,
artists and educators to collectively take steps to return us to a more cul-
turally generative notion of creativity education and how that might be
enacted. As part of this globally diverse book series, I welcome Kalin’s
contribution as a particularly American-specific contribution to the diverse
and dynamic ways in which creativity scholars are approaching the call for
more integrated, more artful and more heartful approaches to creativity in
education, workplaces and making spaces. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much
as I have.

October 2017 Anne M. Harris

v
vi   SERIES EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

Series editor
Principal Research Fellow and Associate Professor
RMIT University
Melbourne Australia
 Contents

1 Introduction   1

2 Educating the Artrepreneur  19

3 Governmentality and Post-Fordist Art Education  41

4 Radical Critique’s Challenge to Art Education  57

5 Civic Literacy and Art Education: Resisting an 

Interpassive Civics Through Art’s Dismeasure  81

6 (Neoliberalized) Collaborative Turn and Art Education 101

7 Decreating Creativity Education: Yet to Be Created 121

Index 133

vii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract  This chapter frames and summarizes the foci of the book.
Broadly, I contextualize creativity education today through a heteroge-
neous approach mobilizing educational policy, theories of creativity, con-
temporary art, art education, economics, post-political critique, and
critical and art theory to reveal the connective threads among diverse
aspects of our times that link neoliberalism across nations and phenome-
non. The volume is intended to hold up a mirror to our current circum-
stances while provoking educators out of complacency to start a
complicated conversation on creativity, resistance, and criticality to encour-
age others to join in. In this quest for change, I offer a variety of forms of
creativity for the reader’s consideration beyond economized creativity.

Keywords Creativity • Neoliberalism • Art education • Educational

policy • Economics

Inside the neoliberalism associated with late capitalism, inherent para-

doxes are managed through reorienting all components of society includ-
ing 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

© The Author(s) 2018 1

N.M. Kalin, The Neoliberalization of Creativity Education,
Creativity, Education and the Arts,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71525-4_1
2   N.M. KALIN

privatization and deregulation. This culture and ethic of entrepreneurial-

ism and competition has become the guiding principle of our time, mak-
ing 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 individu-
als, 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 globaliza-
tion, 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 competitive-
ness, schooling plays a role in preparing the world’s youth for employ-
ment. 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 pri-
orities for education have been replaced by neoliberal ideology. This radi-
cal redefinition has been under way in the United States and elsewhere
over the last few decades, buttressed by a popular consensus across politi-
cal 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 associ-
ated 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 indus-
try or of education” as it is currently considered “a powerful economic
driver, not simply the province of the arts and the hobbyist” (p. 651).
  INTRODUCTION   3

Disciplinary boundaries are being counteracted by moves to delegiti-

mize 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 educa-
tor, this volume considers the broader strokes of what is at stake for cre-
ativity, 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 rational-
ity. 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 particu-
lar financialized reinterpretations of creativity that may actually run coun-
ter 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 neolib-
eral 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 associ-
ated 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 neo-
liberalism 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.
4   N.M. KALIN

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,

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)

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).
  INTRODUCTION   5

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 abil-
ity to imagine and devise innovative new ways of addressing problems,
answering questions or expressing meaning through the application, syn-
thesis 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 capital-
ism to tighten the grip of economic rationality on educational policy.

Correspondingly, GERM has been 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 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.

P21
For over a decade, P21, in collaboration with employers, policymakers, and
educators, has concentrated its efforts on advocating for students to be bet-
ter 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
6   N.M. KALIN

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 edu-
cation policy and practice and to make innovative teaching and learning a
reality for every child. (p. 2)

P21’s priorities for creativity are, in part, articulated in the following pas-
sage from the research brief titled What We Know About Creativity:

From creating works of art, producing abundant inexpensive water, devel-

oping non-invasive health devices or net zero energy homes, finding medical
cures, restoring and improving urban infrastructure, generating new energy
sources, and preventing nuclear terror, to developing sustainable ways to
solve complex geopolitical problems, the ability to produce and implement
new, useful ideas is rapidly becoming a critical attribute for leveraging
knowledge success and increasing quality of life. (Plucker,  Kaufman, and
Beghetto n.d., p. 1)

P21’s Framework for 21st Century Learning (Partnership for 21st

Century Learning 2015) describes the “skills, knowledge and expertise
students must master to succeed in work and life; it is a blend of content
knowledge, specific skills, expertise and literacies” (para. 1). Building
upon the base of subject knowledge, students need to master Key Subjects
and 21st Century Themes through the interweaving of the interdisciplin-
ary themes of Global Awareness; Financial, Economic, Business, and
Entrepreneurial Literacy; Civic Literacy; Health Literacy; and
Environmental Literacy (Partnership for 21st Century Learning 2015). In
Chap. 5 of this book, I will focus on the theme of Civic Literacy and its
implications for visual arts education, while Chap. 2 delves into Financial,
Economic, Business, and Entrepreneurial Literacy.
Additionally, the Learning and Innovation Skills (often interchangeable
with the term “4Cs,” which include creativity, critical thinking, communi-
cation, and collaboration) officially encompass Creativity and Innovation,
Critical Thinking and Problem Solving, as well as Communication and
Collaboration. I take on creativity and innovation throughout this vol-
ume, but I also focus Chap. 4 on critical thinking, while Chap. 6 is devoted
to considering collaboration in relation to art and creativity education.
Lastly, Life and Career Skills to be taught in all subject areas include
  INTRODUCTION   7

Flexibility and Adaptability, Initiative and Self-Direction, Social and Cross-­

Cultural Skills, Productivity and Accountability, and Leadership and
Responsibility. Chapter 3 revolves around the implications of these Life
and Career Skills for creativity and art education.
In order to facilitate all of these components within subject areas such
as visual art, P21 has developed Maps. The Map for the Arts (Partnership
for 21st Century Skills n.d.), intended to effectively wrap the teaching of
P21 around the student achievement goals of the National Standards for
Arts Education, was written by representatives from the arts including
F.  Robert Sabol and R.  Barry Shauck from the National Art Education
Association. Additionally, corporate representatives from Cisco and
Crayola, among others, made up the members of P21’s Working Group
for this particular Map for the Arts, which was sponsored by New Media
Consortium and the National Education Association.
Unsurprisingly, members of P21 come from a number of transnational
corporations such as Disney Corporation and Apple that might represent
creative industries seeking a workforce that is ready to meet the needs of
immaterial labor under post-Fordism. This marriage of art and industry
within a national curricular initiative seems normal, perhaps. As stated
within the Map for the Arts,

[b]usiness leaders and visionary thinkers concerned about preparation of

students for the future know that the ability to be creative—a key 21st
Century Skill—is native to the arts and is one of the primary processes
learned through arts education. (Partnership for 21st Century Skills
n.d., p. 2)

Moreover, “the arts share common characteristics that make arts educa-
tion powerful preparation for college, career, and a fulfilling life”
(Partnership for 21st Century Skills n.d., p. 2).
My running explication of P21 and its associated documents forms a
central theme throughout this book. Publications from this body are
examined in the ensuing chapters in various ways. As I investigate GERM
developments such as P21, I rearticulate creativity’s place within art edu-
cation, while I also reconsider art and creativity education’s relationship to
collaboration, citizenship, and criticality. This will culminate in my final
reflections at the conclusion of the book, providing a crystallization of my
point of view and illustrating my larger perspectives on neoliberalism and
education.
8   N.M. KALIN

Creativity Now
Conceptualizations of creativity change according to context. Since the
eighteenth century, creativity has been associated with the artist as “an
autonomous ‘creator,’” later “combined with the traditionally male notion
of genius to produce the idea of the artist as an ‘exceptional subject’—the
owner of an ingenious and exceptional artistic mind” (von Osten 2011,
p.  136). This discursive formation of what it means to be creative has
largely “served bourgeois individualism as a … general description of
activity meant to transcend or elude economic determinants” (von Osten
2011, p. 136). In the past, creativity remained all but unnoticed by gov-
ernments and business. This allowed for greater autonomy in the postwar
years for the flourishing of creativity in the service of critical art forms.
Nevertheless, nowadays, creativity and culture are “of the utmost concern
to commercial organizations and art seemingly no longer questions the
social” (McRobbie 2001/2013, p. 59). As Harris (2014) notes, creativity
is “being advanced most rapidly at the present moment by economists,
not artists or educators” (p.  78) as a useful component of an entrepre-
neur’s skillset so that creativity is further “conflated with ‘innovation,’ and
shunted away from notions of ‘art’” (p. 80).
The necessity for creativity today is primarily rooted in economic con-
cerns, particularly the urgent search for innovation to address global eco-
nomic challenges. Under the creative turn in capitalism since the 1970s,
there has been an attendant movement to harness creative capital for com-
modification and profit (Harris 2014, p.  153). In order to achieve this,
neoliberalism has embarked on hollowing out and colonizing creative acts
“dependent on a mutable, reproducible and eventually dispensable con-
tent” (Adams and Owens 2016, p. 7). This co-option of creativity disre-
gards very specific, political, socially engaged, critical, and context-dependent
forms of creativity that are less transferable or replicable across sites and
disciplines, an incommodiousness antithetical to neoliberalism’s preda-
cious demands for creativity (Adams and Owens 2016, p. 7).
Under neoliberalism, curriculum and pedagogy once based on “the
public interest, community values, and emancipatory values become sub-
jugated to the pursuit of financial profits” (Saltman 2014, p. 20). Corporate
school reforms, such as P21, aim to align public schooling with business
values that will prepare students for future jobs in a global economy, plac-
ing democratic, emancipatory, creative, and critical forms of education in
great jeopardy. This economization of education is reflective of what De
  INTRODUCTION   9

Lissovoy (2015) terms a pervasive austere pedagogy predicated on neolib-

eralism’s political-economic strategy of perpetual austerity, which provides
an excuse for narrowing such public education indulgences as empower-
ment, exploration, critique, justice, and creativity into individualization,
innovation, and entrepreneurialism. In this endeavor, creativity has value
in the pursuit of profit alone.

Innovative Creativity
Creativity is now driven by innovation, especially in the context of busi-
ness, but this new normal is rapidly progressing into unfamiliar arenas
such as art and its education. Harris (2014) makes the case that innovation
is distinct from creativity in its market focus, economic contextualization,
and overriding imperative for use-value (p. 124). Nevertheless, through
the relocation of creativity away from art and aesthetics toward economic
productivity and innovation,

creativity’s ability to morph and change to the demands of a productivity

culture signals its reframing as ‘innovation,’ a core skill and disposition of
21st-century learners and workers, but one that is increasingly inseparable
from capital. (Harris 2014, p. 13)

The conflation of creativity with innovation pervades educational dis-

courses that have infiltrated education mandates for schooling. A case in
point is the actual rationale for a creativity focus articulated within P21
(Plucker et al. n.d.) which fuses creativity with innovation, as in the fol-
lowing excerpt:

The well-documented, shifting global paradigm from manufacturing to

knowledge-based to innovation economies makes the ability to solve prob-
lems creatively a necessary skill for educational and workforce success. In an
age when much of the world’s information can be quickly accessed on a
smartphone, a premium is placed on the ability to use that knowledge in
creative ways to produce valuable outcomes and solve complex problems.
The ability to innovate, both alone and in groups, leads to positive out-
comes in the workplace, the playing field, and the family room. (p. 1)

Nonetheless, it bears considering that this marriage of innovation with

creativity
10   N.M. KALIN

is a form of ideological gentrification, in that while appearing to value the

arts and creative endeavour it is really redirecting and narrowing the dis-
course of creativity into productive innovation and marketplace measures of
value. And this more than anything signals the death knell of ‘arts educa-
tion,’ which remains tainted by its relationship to risk, un-productivity
(time-wasting, daydreaming) and ‘failure’—all of which are increasingly
impossible in a marketplace economy. (Harris 2014, p. 19)

Innovation threatens to subsume and narrow creativity into processes

that are “market- and product-driven, characterised by product develop-
ment, industry expansion and marketability” (Harris 2014, p. 18). I agree
with Harris (2014) that we need to be aware of the colonization of cre-
ative practices by the marketplace in order to retain and extend alternate
forms of creativity for other purposes. This colonization of creativity under
the pretense of a marketized and capitalized endeavor could place our
abilities to explore other modes of creativity at risk.

Democratized Creativity
We are witnessing a semantic and social recoding of notions of art and
creativity as they are absorbed by the demands and desires of creative
industry (Raunig et  al. 2011, p.  1). To further illustrate, Adams and
Owens (2016) make a helpful distinction between democratic and high
creativity, with the latter being “associated with elitism and notions of the
exceptional and the gifted” and the former including “the imaginative
events and productions of ordinary people, the masses of the populace”
(p. 6). As creativity is democratized and applicable to anyone and everyday
practices, its ubiquitousness has diminished its currency (Adams and
Owens 2016, p. 5). With creativity’s increased accessibility and necessity,
individuals are more convinced than ever that they have the means to cre-
ate and something unique to express (Deresiewicz 2015).1
As attitudes about creativity’s accessibility and utility broaden, more
complex conceptions of creativity come under vigorous attack “in the
name of democracy, constituted through valorisation of the lowest com-
mon denominator, i.e., equality, sameness” (Peers 2011, p.  421).
According to McRobbie (2001/2013), in relation to art,

[w]hile creativity has traditionally been nurtured in interiorised, slow and

quiet mental and physical spaces, in the new cultural economy it is encour-
aged to be increasingly populist, noisy, easy, thin: in the words of Scott Lash,
  INTRODUCTION   11

“flattened out”. Where there is little or no time for thinking, the art-work
itself can hardly be thoughtful. (p. 60)

Art, like creativity, is being funneled into the accessible, reproducible, con-
trollable, and instrumentalized.
With the advent of universal creative potential and innovation, it then
presumably follows that society should be well-poised to feed insatiable
market needs. While this not only indicates a shift in access to creativity, it
is also reflective of post-Fordist labor demands. This conviction is reflected
in business CEOs identifying “creativity as the primary ‘leadership compe-
tency’ of the future” (Bronson and Merryman 2010, para. 7).

Critical Creativity
In response to these changes, Adams and Owens (2016) offer critical
creativity to juxtapose creativity with democracy at the intersection of
imagination, political action, agency, and notions of citizenship that do
not stifle conflicting perspectives (pp. 19–20). Such modes borrow from
the avant-garde tradition in art (instead of business priorities) while cham-
pioning the unorthodox and antagonizing conformity through imagina-
tive and disobedient processes that express tensions apparent within
society and its institutions (Adams and Owens 2016, pp. 16–18) wrestling
creativity back to its political potency for democratic education and away
from its more neoliberal forms. This volume further explores these current
conceptualizations of creativity from within GERM examples and P21
mandates, while also offering possible conduits into critical creativity edu-
cation through art and its education.

Overview
Creativity education is integral to art education. Art educators educate
through the mobilization and encouragement of creativity to a multitude
of ends including social critique, design solutions, and self-expression.
While creativity education is now rising in its status across school curricula
away from being exclusively viewed as a therapeutic frill to the visual art
program, in its ascendance and integration throughout education it has
also become vocationalized to best meet the needs of a post-Fordist,
talent-­led economy, its radical potential filed down and fitted appropri-
ately into a business plan. As McRobbie (2016) maintains, creativity edu-
cation across all levels and sites is being transformed through
12   N.M. KALIN

the importing of vocabularies from the ‘business school’, which in turn

become a new orthodoxy. … Pedagogy is, more than before, the favoured
instrument for transforming the landscape of training and learning such that
the business school model is bolstered and potentially capable of supplant-
ing the critical and analytical bodies of social science and humanities knowl-
edge that previously were installed within the curriculum of the ‘art school’.
(p. 59)

How did creativity become so integrally and exclusively aligned with

fulfilling the concerns of businesses and their owners? How has creativity
become synonymous with marketplace competition? What if creativity and
its education were reconstituted around political consciousness and critical
engagement with our surroundings? My response to these questions
coalesces in the chapters that follow.
While this book is a necessarily incomplete account that traces my
recent concerns, mingling creative education with contemporary art, post-­
political critique, critical theory, and philosophy, I go beyond the airing of
paradoxes inherent in neoliberalism toward alternative strategies and con-
ceptions of politics, power, and pedagogy as sites of struggle for our ways
of being together. It is important to acknowledge that I take a heteroge-
neous approach as I reveal the connective threads among diverse aspects
of our times that link neoliberalism across nations and phenomena. The
notion of political economy has proven beneficial as it requires “us to
think about the economy in relation to the totality of social life including
culture, education, and civics rather than restricting economic concerns to
questions such as supply, demand, money, and prices” (Saltman 2014,
p. 14). This volume is intended to hold up a mirror to our current circum-
stances while provoking educators out of complacency to start a compli-
cated conversation on creativity, resistance, and criticality to encourage
others to join in. In this quest for change, I offer a variety of forms of
creativity for the reader’s consideration beyond economized creativity.
I begin in the next chapter by asking: What if business remade creativity
education on its terms? What would become of the fields of art and its
education in the wake of creativity-for-business only? This chapter explores
these questions in light of the intensifying entrepreneurialization of art
and its education. The implications of the rise of an entrepreneurial sub-
jectivity along with its accompanying priorities of accelerated individual-
ism, vocationalization, innovation, and profit will be used to develop my
analysis of such realities located within art and its education. In particular,
  INTRODUCTION   13

I examine P21’s push for entrepreneurial literacy through art and creativ-
ity education along with the rise of artrepreneurs within contemporary art.
Framing the more detailed considerations that follow, I end with a plea for
the relative autonomy of art education so that it may not only be a mode
of vocationalization, but also a site of struggle and critical creativity.
Surveying the shifting landscape that is art education today, the third
chapter examines the economic and ideological contexts from which
recent educational mandates emanate. Specifically, I bear down on neolib-
eral ideology’s influence on contemporary conceptions of creativity and its
education. Under the present post-Fordist system of economic produc-
tion, artists—with their drive to innovate, flexible production practices,
and tolerance for precarity—are being held up as ideal workers. The result-
ing requirements of immaterial labor focused on accelerating and harness-
ing creativity and innovation in the current post-industrial capitalism have
obliged the restructuring of education through forms of neoliberal gov-
ernmentality that set about instilling specific values and urgencies mani-
festing in the governmentalization of learning and economization of
education. In my consideration of the convergence of these pressures I
focus on the field of visual arts education. I assess how P21 mandates the
acceleration of post-Fordist economic goals for art education through the
governing of self and others that greatly reduces possibilities for nurturing
creativity.
Next, I take up the notion of critique in relation to creativity. In Chap.
4 I assert that art education is complicit in advancing neoliberal priorities
in its adherence to and stewardship of an ever-narrowing pragmatic ver-
sion of itself as a field in the service of vocationalization and creative prob-
lem solving. Employing such mechanisms as pragmatic blindness in line
with a productivist ideology, art education aims to maintain present ver-
sions of the field safe from harm and reinvention. GERM has come to
embrace both creative and critical thinking skills toward innovation within
policy and curricular mandates—the two skillsets need each other in order
for innovation to thrive. Yet, both creativity and criticality are morphing
into altered forms that actually limit the possible. I delve into the state of
criticism in relation to art education at this time playing out in the coer-
cion and contortion of criticality into critical thinking skills for practical
solutions. Radical critique is proposed as a counter to the pragmatization
of criticality, art education, and society at large. For it is through the chal-
lenge of radical critique that structures can undergo disarticulation and
become more cognizant of their current shortsightedness and failings. To
14   N.M. KALIN

begin, I tease out some differences between critical thinking and criticality,
before examining these phenomena in light of the trend toward increased
horizontalism within society. I round out the chapter with an exploration
of the implications radical critique as a proposal might hold for art
education.
Chapter 5 contemplates the police order of neoliberalism and its impact
on the democratic imaginaries of creativity education. My post-political
critique of the tensions of art education under market fundamentalism is
influenced by Jacques Rancière. His work is used to grasp the frictions and
potentialities between neoliberal forms of schooling and democratic peda-
gogies in art education. Throughout, I ruminate on the following ques-
tion: What if art education could be reconceived as a site of experimentation
with democratic political engagement so that civic learning might create
and transform subjectivities? In this endeavor, creativity education would
be both reconfigured and essential. Specifically, I examine the interdisci-
plinary theme of civic literacy from within P21’s Map for the Arts in order
to ponder the bringing together of creativity and citizenship education as
a site of potential emancipation. I maintain that this intersection in our
post-political times reflects the neoliberal police order in ways that under-
mine civic subjectification and perpetuate a hatred of democracy.
Simultaneously, the push for citizenship education also offers a point of
disagreement between post-political common sense and its subversion by
the emergence of new subjectivities through an art and creativity educa-
tion premised on the equality of intelligences.
Chapter 6 lays out the broader contexts from which collaboration
comes to the foreground at this time and sounds a number of cautions
against the (neoliberalized) collaborative turn in art learning and practice
as evidenced in P21’s 4Cs, the new Finnish National Curriculum
Framework, and the cultural industries. The promotion of collaboration
is, in part, due to post-Fordist labor models and the rise of network struc-
tures and behaviors. Within this nexus, collaboration maintains a demo-
cratic aura of a horizontal, decentralized platform for learning and creating
that resists and subverts more restrictive vertical power structures such as
those characterized by Paulo Freire’s banking model of schooling. To
flesh out these movements, I consider the model of project work within
post-­Fordist labor along with precarious, post-studio practices associated
with the cultural and creative industries. In sum, my argument is that
what we gain in relational, networked, and horizontal working modes
within contemporary collaboration comes at the potential loss of expertise,
  INTRODUCTION   15

dissensus, and sustained antagonism, which ultimately thwarts innovation

and creativity of any sort. I end with a plea for the autonomy of collabora-
tion within art education apart from entrepreneurial ends and the auton-
omy of the individual artist to step out of the collaborative to name the
errors in daily life. Exploring this plea within creativity education is crucial
in order to resuscitate critical creativity from the neoliberalized collabora-
tive turn.
In the concluding chapter, I work through Agamben’s notion of decre-
ation. I explore how educators, artists, and activists might reanimate
their roles as creatives in this time through starving neoliberalized, entre-
preneurialized, and economized forms of creativity of their consent. I
propose alternative modes of decreation where productivity, innovation,
and praxis are denied their preset ends toward a state of exception that
allows us to begin anew in reimaging what creativity education might
have been.
I am most invested in this project toward considering the value of criti-
cal forms of creativity education for our common futures that do not focus
solely on economic profit. Following Giroux (Evans and Giroux 2016), I
instead value a critical education “as the art of the possible” (para. 20).
Throughout the pages that follow, I ponder the potentiality for a critical
creativity to resist and question such forces and foils without being fully
extinguished. In my proposal for a critical creativity I am not just ­endorsing
objections to the status quo, but also offer alternative modes of being,
doing, and thinking beyond unpacking the given neoliberal governmen-
tality and market fundamentalism. We need to feed the creative imagina-
tion and lure it away from its colonization by capital. In the following
chapters, I make the case that schooling, and art education in particular,
provides spaces for creating alternative futures.

Notes
1. Gaztambide-Fernàndez and Parekh (2017) counter this argument in their
recent article titled “Market ‘choices’ or structured pathways? How special-
ized arts education contributes to the reproduction of inequality.”

References
Adams, J., & Owens, A. (2016). Theories of creativity and democratic education:
Practices and politics of learning through the arts. New York: Routledge.
16   N.M. KALIN

Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field of cultural production. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bronson, P., & Merryman, A. (2010, July 19). The creativity crisis. Newsweek.
Retrieved from http://www.newsweek.com/creativity-crisis-74665. Accessed
27 July 2017.
Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Brooklyn:
Zone Books.
De Lissovoy, N. (2015). Education and emancipation in the neoliberal era: Being,
teaching, and power. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Deresiewicz, W. (2015). The neoliberal arts: How college sold its soul to the mar-
ket. Harper’s Magazine, 331(1984), 25–31.
Dilley, A., Kaufman, J. C., Kennedy, C., & Plucker, J. A. (n.d.). What we know
about critical thinking. Washington, DC: P21Partnership for 21st Century
Learning.
Evans, B., & Giroux, H.  A. (2016). The violence of forgetting. The New  York
Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/20/opinion/the-
violence-of-forgetting.html?_r=0. Accessed 27 July 2017.
Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France,
1978-1979 (G.  Burchell, Trans.). New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. (Original
work published in 2004).
Gaztambide-Fernàndez, R., & Parekh, G. (2017). Market “choices” or structured
pathways? How specialized arts education contributes to the reproduction of
inequality. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 25(41). Retrieved from http://
epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/download/2716/1897. Accessed 16 Aug 2017.
Harris, A. (2014). The creative turn: Toward a new aesthetic imaginary. Boston:
Sense Publishers.
Harris, A., & Ammermann, M. (2016). The changing face of creativity in
Australian education. Teaching Education, 27(1), 103–113.
McRobbie, A. (2013). “Everyone is creative”: Artists as new economy pioneers?
ONCURATING.org, 1(16), 58–61. (Original work published in 2001).
McRobbie, A. (2016). Be creative: Making a living in the new culture industries.
Malden: Polity Press.
McWilliam, E. L., & Haukka, S. (2008). Educating the creative workforce: New
directions for twenty-first century schooling. British Educational Research
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Partnership for 21st Century Learning. (2015). Framework for 21st Century
Learning. Washington, DC: Partnership for 21st Century Learning. Retrieved
from http://www.p21.org/storage/documents/P21_framework_0515.pdf.
Accessed 27 July 2017.
Partnership for 21st Century Skills. (n.d.). 21st Century Skills Map. The Arts.
Washington, DC: Partnership for 21st Century Learning. Retrieved from
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27 July 2017.
  INTRODUCTION   17

Peers, C. (2011). Making art invisible: Visual education and the cultural stagna-
tion of neo-liberal rationality. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of
Education, 32(3), 415–429.
Plucker, J. A., Kaufman, J. C., & Beghetto, R. A. (n.d.). What we know about cre-
ativity. Washington, DC: Partnership for 21st Century Learning. Retrieved
from http://www.p21.org/storage/documents/docs/Research/P21_4Cs_
Research_Brief_Series_-_Creativity.pdf. Accessed July 2017.
Raunig, G., Ray, G., & Wuggenig, U. (2011). Introduction: On the strange case
of ‘creativity’ and its troubled resurrection 1. In G.  Raunig, G.  Ray, &
U. Wuggenig (Eds.), Critique of creativity: Precarity, subjectivity and resistance
in the ‘creative industries’ (pp. 1–5). London: MayFlyBooks.
Sahlberg, S. (2015). Finish lessons 2.0 (2nd ed.). New  York: Teachers College
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Saltman, K. J. (2014). The politics of education: A critical introduction. Boulder:
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WEFUSA_NewVisionforEducation_Report2015.pdf. Accessed 27 July 2017.
 CHAPTER 2

Educating the Artrepreneur

Abstract  This chapter begins by asking: What if business remade creativ-

ity education on its terms? What would become of art and its education in
the wake of creativity-for-business only? This chapter explores these ques-
tions in light of the intensifying entrepreneurialization of art and its edu-
cation. I examine the Partnership for the 21st Century Skills’ push for
entrepreneurial literacy through art and creativity education along with
the rise of artrepreneurs within contemporary art. I end with a plea for the
relative autonomy of art education so that it may not only be a mode of
vocationalization, but also a site of struggle and critical creativity.

Keywords  Entrepreneurialism • Contemporary art • Education • 21st

Century Skills

This chapter puts in question the incommensurability between neoliberal-

ism and art education. Today, it does appear that art education’s very
survival relies on the extent to which it can be reformed to better advance
economic purposes. While art education for the sake of economic com-
petitiveness is ripe with contradiction for both students and educators of
art, to many readers this might seem a realistic and logical development
without any viable alternative. This cynicism is understandable as neolib-
eralism has become so seamlessly naturalized into the common sense of

© The Author(s) 2018 19

N.M. Kalin, The Neoliberalization of Creativity Education,
Creativity, Education and the Arts,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71525-4_2
20   N.M. KALIN

our lives, politics, institutions, practices, discourses, subjectivities, and

identities. Nevertheless, I can’t imagine that I am alone in wanting to bet-
ter understand the impacts associated with neoliberalism’s reconfiguration
of the priorities of art and its education.
To bring out the associated issues even more sharply, I outline and chal-
lenge the entrepreneurialization of art education under way at this time. I
articulate how art and its education are being instrumentalized to buttress
a neoliberal agenda that values the entrepreneurial above all else. My
underlying question is: How does the acceleration of entrepreneurial pri-
orities, including greater individualism, vocationalization, innovation, and
profit, play out within schooling and art? What implications do such a
narrowing of focus hold for our field and for art itself? This analysis pro-
ceeds in four sections. First, I examine GERM’s various mandates for
entrepreneurial literacy through creativity education. Then I contextualize
entrepreneurialism through a discussion of neoliberalism. Following this,
I consider how art education might be conceived as an investment.
The second section of the chapter takes neoliberal entrepreneurialism
to its intended limit through an articulation of the features of the entre-
preneurial self as the individualized and responsibilized citizen. I also con-
template the entrepreneurial self in the context of art education. In the
third section, I broaden my focus from the entrepreneurialization of art
education and society in order to examine how this phenomenon holds
sway over art practice (now creativism) and artistic identity (now artrepre-
neur). Finally, in the fourth section, I consider how art educators might
conceive and enact resistances to art for the sake of entrepreneurialism for
economic growth.

Entrepreneurial Literacy Through Art Education

My exploration of these specific topics and their encroachment on educa-
tion first crystallized for me when I perused P21and found creativity cou-
pled with innovation in their version of the 4Cs (Partnership for 21st
Century Learning 2015). I then read further and was quite taken aback
that P21’s Map for the Arts requires visual arts to relate to interdisciplinary
themes including Financial, Economic, Business, and Entrepreneurial
Literacy (Partnership for 21st Century Skills n.d.), broadly defined as

• Knowing how to make appropriate personal economic choices

• Understanding the role of the economy in society
   EDUCATING THE ARTREPRENEUR    21

• Using entrepreneurial skills to enhance workplace productivity and

career options (P21 Partnership for 21st Century Skills 2015, p. 2)

Specifically, in the visual arts, these literacies propose to assist students in

knowing “how to make appropriate personal economic choices when they
create budgets” for art exhibits, and “how to estimate the time and costs
of materials and labor to produce finished works and understand current
trends, supply and demand, and the effects of the economy on marketing
their artistic products” (Partnership for 21st Century Skills n.d., p. 16).
One might ask: Why the interest in entrepreneurial literacy in the arts
at this time? P21 (Partnership for 21st Century Skills n.d.) provides a
response in this rationale:

Nationally, there are 5.7 million full-time equivalent jobs in the arts. The
nonprofit arts and culture industry generates $166.2 billion in economic
activity every year, including $63.1 billion in spending by organizations and
an additional $103.1 billion in event-related spending by their audiences.
(p. 16)

The arts are economically viable like no other time in the history of the
United States.
This snapshot of P21 is meant to provide a backdrop to the ensuing
discussions concerning neoliberalized schooling. While P21 may not have
an impact on every art educational context, it intends to not only influence
all of K-12 schooling, but also redirect community college curricula and
hold higher education accountable to its priorities, not only in the United
States, but also across the globe.1 While this reach has yet to materialize,
P21’s mandate for the infusion of entrepreneurial literacy within schooling
has been taken up far beyond its American borders, sped up by the infec-
tious GERM.
As countries across the globe bend their economies toward innovation-­
driven growth, increasingly, education systems are being rallied to foster
such character qualities as curiosity, initiative, persistence/grit, adaptabil-
ity, and leadership, along with social and cultural awareness through entre-
preneurial activity in schooling (World Economic Forum 2015). This
reflects the realization that grades and testing do not sufficiently represent
an appropriately equipped entrepreneurial workforce for the future.
A case in point: As China positions itself beyond a manufacturing, sub-
assembly, and processing center for multinational corporations, it aims to
22   N.M. KALIN

become an innovation nation yielding entrepreneurs of the future. These

reforms launched as early as 2001 (Pang and Plucker 2013, p. 254) incor-
porate more time on the arts, critical thinking, competitiveness, and cre-
ativity in schooling, accompanied by less emphasis on standardized tests
and homework. This mandate for cultural-based economic growth aims,
in part, to reverse the inhibition of creativity under the Cultural Revolution
(OECD 2012; Rubin 2014). Mathematics, geography, English, Chinese,
and science are to include in each subject area’s goals the development of
creative spirit and awareness relative to students’ development of practical
abilities in each subject. While these reforms are tied closely with innova-
tion in applied areas such as science and technology, they do nonetheless
indicate a shift of creativity education in China toward a stronger embrace
of teaching with creativity in mind across the curriculum, despite the over-
all marginalization of creativity because of its inaccessibility to academic
testing.
Another example is found in the overhaul Singapore’s education system
has been undergoing as Teng (2016) lays out:

Already, in the early stages of primary education, exams have become a thing
of the past. Pupils are increasingly being encouraged to express themselves.
Applied learning is in, along with the development of character and life
skills. (n.p.)

In regard to expressive skills, more emphasis on and time devoted to the

arts in order to develop students’ creative and expressive capabilities has
been required through the reduction of subject content in other areas
(OECD 2012). Singapore won’t likely rid its society of an “obsession with
academic excellence and discipline, but a new focus on entrepreneurship—
and notions of challenging convention—marks an admission by educators
that exams alone can’t produce one ingredient needed for economic suc-
cess: new ideas” (Reuters 2017, n.p.).
In what follows, I take P21 and GERM examples at their word by play-
ing out possible scenarios resulting from the embrace of an entrepreneur-
ialized art education within the context of neoliberal society.

Neoliberalism and Education
The guiding principles of our time are economic. My analysis, following
Michel Foucault (1991), is grounded in the notion that neoliberalism is an
order of normative reason established over the last three decades governing
   EDUCATING THE ARTREPRENEUR    23

every aspect of human life through economic values, metrics, and prac-
tices. This economization (Caliskan and Callon 2009) of all is transforming
knowledge and conduct, need and desire, through a reformation of capi-
talism into neoliberalism. Instead of a publicly regulated economy, the
overarching goals of neoliberalism are the extension of profitable enter-
prise through the privileging of the liberty of individuals to trade freely on
open markets. Individuals are reconfigured in order to become market
actors or homo oeconomicus (Brown 2015, p.  31), wherein the subject
becomes “a unit of entrepreneurial and self-investing capital” (p.  41)
motivated toward self-actualization. As Brown (2015) states, “[h]uman
capital’s constant and ubiquitous aim, whether studying, interning, work-
ing, planning retirement, or reinventing itself in a new life, is to entrepre-
neurialize its endeavors, appreciate its value” (p. 36).
Under a neoliberal assault on public education, educators have been
desensitized to many of the paradoxes they labor within. One impact is
the delimiting justification of education for the sake of economic com-
petitiveness, irrespective of the additional subjectivities and roles educa-
tion might enable. According to Brown (2011), higher education
institutions, especially in the postwar United States, were restructured in
line with the radically democratic role of “developing the person and the
citizen, not merely the job holder” (p. 25) for a wide swath of Americans
with the accompanying intentions of “egalitarianism and social mobility,
… achieving a broadly educated democracy as well as providing depth
and enrichment to individuality” (p. 24). Brown (2011) contends that
raw economic interest was considered “too thin a reed and too crude a
principle on which to build both an individual life and a democracy”
(pp. 26–27). This egalitarian and humanist commitment to democratized
knowledge included offering curricula and relevant intellectual skills to
enlarge students’ encounters with the world and educate the citizenry for
“an enhanced capacity to participate in public life and contribute to the
public good” (Brown 2011, p.  28). Alas, neoliberal forms of public
higher education are “increasingly structured to entrench rather than
redress class trajectories, abjure the project of producing an educated
public, and facilitate capital accumulation over all other values” (Brown
2011, p. 24).
Education is no longer considered a public, social, and common good,
but an investment in job training that must yield a return. Curricula need
to adhere to marketable outcomes so that educational worth is entirely
focused on return on investment of time, effort, and money in future
24   N.M. KALIN

employment and income. This sidesteps previous goals toward “developing

intelligent, thoughtful elites and reproducing culture, and more recently,
enacting a principle of equal opportunity and cultivating a broadly edu-
cated citizenry” (Brown 2015, p. 24).

Art Education as Investment

It might seem at once both strange and commonsensical that art educa-
tion is currently acquiescing to its own economization as the purview of
neoliberalism extends ever wider. Art education for self-investment and
increased human capital appears to fit this ideology perfectly. Certainly, if
the end goal for art education is solely to create makers and innovators for
the economy, then any other version of our work is irrelevant beyond the
future earning potential of our students. Creativity and criticality toward
freedom and the common good are a waste of time with such a potentially
low monetary return on a student’s investment of time, effort, or money.
Within a neoliberal management of education, political and critical pur-
suits recede, deemed useless.
Economic shortcomings and societal problems can now be framed as
educational inadequacies—if we don’t have enough skilled workers, edu-
cation has failed to provide adequate human capital, or individuals haven’t
kept up with their own continuing education needs. In this way, the
knowledge-based economy has necessitated a “capitalization of learning”
as a “force to produce added value” (Simons and Masschelein 2008,
p. 397). In light of this conception of learning, Peers (2011) makes the
claim that visual arts education “may have become a redundant and unnec-
essary residue of a past age, concerned with obsolete fantasies about
human self-expression” (p. 415), for “[i]n educational terms, it no longer
matters whether knowing is authentic so much as whether the ­performance
can be capitalized” (pp. 420–421). Moreover, Gilead (2012), in a critique
of the investment approach to arts education, asserts that this view will
lead to the underestimation of arts’ other values such as emotional devel-
opment and self-expression because of the impossibility of accurate assess-
ment and prediction of its returns due to “their personal, surprising,
unique, and ambiguous nature” (p. 90). All this uncertainty and lack of
immediate returns based on the ambiguity of art assessment can detract
from the investment of time, effort, and resources devoted to art educa-
tion. For “[w]hen compared with other forms of educational investment
   EDUCATING THE ARTREPRENEUR    25

in which the returns are easily calculated, predictable, and rapid such as
professional or on-the-job-training, its value will be systematically under-
rated” (Gilead 2012, p. 91).

The Entrepreneurial Self

For Foucault2 (1991), entrepreneurship encompasses forms of self-­
government within a specific governmental regime. The enterprising self
is self-governed so that individuals are perceived as having services that
must be tailored to a specific market through self-management of training,
costs, and development. Consequently, individuals are encouraged to
leverage their competitive positioning through adopting a managerial atti-
tude toward themselves. They each need to find out which competencies
they don’t currently hold but are nonetheless required competencies to
function economically.
As Berardi (2013) deduces, neoliberal ideology “is based on the idea
that the highest ambition of every human being should be to become a
private entrepreneur; a wannabe business (wo)man, and free agent”
(p. 23). Neoliberalism needs entrepreneurs to push innovation and sustain
expansion of the economy. Therefore, the ideal neoliberal subject is the
competitive, responsibilized, and individualized entrepreneur (Rose-­
Redwood 2006). An entrepreneurial self regards itself “as inhabiting an
environment, having needs and producing goods (or investing in human
capital) in order to meet or satisfy these needs” (Simons and Masschelein
2006, p. 419). Therefore, entrepreneurs of the self are “responsible for
(managing) the production of their own well-being” (Simons and
Masschelein 2008, p. 407) through proactive and creative adaptation in
response to a given environment in order to maximize their human
capital.
Entrepreneurial subjects assess their own efficiency and effort in a con-
stant appraisal of self-conduct3 in relation to the global market. All endeav-
ors are analyzed for their cost and benefit as the economy is embodied as
a value system, personal discipline, and method to estimate the possible
rewards gained through investing time and energy. Such an enterprising
spirit comes through increased participation in and access to open mar-
kets, free and/or flexible labor, interdisciplinarity, innovation, and decreas-
ing confidence in public institutions and services. For to live an
entrepreneurial life during times of limited resources is “not about having
26   N.M. KALIN

a position (in a normal, socialized structure), but is about moving around

in different environments or networks in order to remain employed”
(Simons and Masschelein 2008, p. 410) or to gain the skills required to
generate an income.

Individualized
Enterprise culture emerging out of the United Kingdom under Margaret
Thatcher’s tenure as prime minister demonstrated the profound change
from a Keynesian welfare state “to a deliberate attempt at cultural restruc-
turing and engineering based upon the neo-liberal model of the entrepre-
neurial self—a shift characterized as … moving from a ‘culture of
dependency’ to one of ‘self-reliance’” (Peters 2001, p. 58). As Léger (2013)
explains, “[s]tate power is dematerialized and is replaced with self-­interest
and the management of open markets. A concomitant entrepreneurial view
of the self, complements the management of economic liberties” (p. 52).
The extended logic behind this self-reliance and its associated individualiza-
tion of society and responsibilization of individuals entails that

[i]f, as Margaret Thatcher succinctly formulated neoliberal rationality,

“there is no such thing as society, only individual men and women” maxi-
mizing interests and ends, then there is no public life to be educated for,
nothing to learn or think about apart from one’s place in private enter-
prises.4 (Brown 2011, p. 23)

As Thatcher’s assertion illuminates, neoliberalism aims to undermine

public life through starving our common forms of public investment while
encouraging self-government, hyper-individualism, privatization, and
desocialization of social issues and responsibilities, effectively ignoring the
need for collective forms, concerns, and subjectivities. In this way, “politi-
cal and social concerns of emancipation are downplayed by forms of per-
sonal empowerment and subjective freedom” (Mylonas 2012, p. 3). Who
has the time to worry about social interests—such as support for the poor
or access to education—when we are busy fending for our own self-­
interests? Therefore, if the individual comes across a problem, it is now
that individual’s concern—not to mention liberty to choose a solution—
instead of a state issue.5
Accordingly, ongoing learning as a reinvestment in human capital and
self-transformation is often declared as the remedy for what might have
   EDUCATING THE ARTREPRENEUR    27

been considered governmental and structural problems such as unemploy-

ment or underemployment. This relieves governments from solving these
problems to focus on “creating and controlling a market environment to
enable entrepreneurial freedom” (Simons and Masschelein 2006, p. 420).
This economization of the common risks transposing “the meaning and
practice of democratic concerns with equality, freedom, and sovereignty
from a political to an economic register” (Brown 2015, p. 41) so that, for
instance, freedom is relegated to free markets.

Responsibilized
Brown (2015) claims the shift from liberal to neoliberal democracy has
transitioned the citizen as the responsibilized entrepreneur willingly self-­
investing while bearing the repeated blows of shared sacrifice during these
times of perpetual austerity (p. 210). Educators in the United States and
Canada (and elsewhere) know of the shared sacrifices that rear their head
every spring with accompanying layoffs and budget cuts in time for the
next school year. For under neoliberalism, the citizen “releases state, law,
and economy from responsibility for and responsiveness to its own condi-
tion and predicaments and is ready when called to sacrifice to the cause of
economic growth, competitive positioning and fiscal constraints” (Brown
2015, p. 219). In turn, neoliberalism frees citizens “from dependency on
state subsidies, creates a thriving entrepreneurial culture and a new work
ethic of self-responsibility,” thereby allowing more self-employment—
“Set up your own business, be free to do your own thing! Live and work
like an artist! You can make it if you really want!” (McRobbie 2001/2013,
p. 59).6
For Lorey (2006), this iteration of the responsibilization for the self
echoes previous failed attempts during the nineteenth century wherein
bourgeois society acquired property in order to ward against the unpre-
dictability of social existence. This eventually gave way to the nation state
and the social contract with its social securities as protection against vul-
nerabilities through public education and welfare. The responsibilization
of the neoliberal self prioritizes individual risk management instead of state
welfarism in order to encourage an enterprise society. This degovernmen-
talization of the state inches government toward becoming exclusively
guided “‘through’ and by the market, including promotion of consumer-­
driven forms of social provision in health, education, and welfare” (Peters
2001, p. 69).
28   N.M. KALIN

The Entrepreneurial Self Meets Art Education

In relation to education, the entrepreneurial self “experiences learning
as the force to guarantee a momentary emancipation in environments
through delivering useful competencies” (Simons and Masschelein
2008, p. 409). It comes as little surprise that since the 1980s there has
been a sustained effort toward cultural reconstruction in line with enter-
prise culture, including tasking education with providing the required
skills to compete within the global economy (Peters 2001, p.  65).
Schooling is being redesigned to enhance students’ enterprise skills and
employability through teaching them to be alert to needs, calculate solu-
tions, and mobilize production, all the while embracing uncertainty and
risk associated with the market. Likewise, teachers address individual
students as entrepreneurial citizens driven to improve their competen-
cies, employability, and income through self-development. This is cer-
tainly the mandate laid out in P21. Students are encouraged to “act as a
‘Me, Inc.’, as individual entrepreneurs who [will] make rational, future-
oriented decisions in the educational market with regard to the possible
market value of their personal competences” (Laermans 2012, p. 67). As
Laermans (2012) declares, gone are the days when a student in the arts
“was viewed as an intellectually curious individual who was keen to give
shape to a usually vague but personally fueled interest in a particular
topic” (p. 67).
As art education’s very survival increasingly relies on the extent to
which it can be reformed to advance economic purposes, it is clear that
art education is now edging toward developing neoliberalized subjects.
Art educators are being compelled to shape art education and students’
conduct in particular ways that align with a neoliberal ethos. In order to
steer students’ subjectivities to more entrepreneurial constructions, art
educators must embrace uncertainty and contingency in their pedago-
gies and curricular forms in line with the internalized risks of the market.
Forms such as project-based, phenomenon-based, and service learning
move away from the teacher as expert toward teacher as project leader
or adapter to student-as-client needs within undefined, albeit entrepre-
neurial, modes that best fit this reconceptualization of education under
a “framework of enterprise project development” (Pongratz 2006,
p.  479). In this way, education is implementing and adopting private
sector management principles for pedagogy. At the same time, alongside
its pedagogical meaning, the entrepreneurial literacy fostered in schooling
   EDUCATING THE ARTREPRENEUR    29

controls for the insecurity and risks of entrepreneurialism with well-

defined competencies7 that embrace self-management in clearly laid out
literacies within a context of fluidity, chance, and great uncertainty of
the neoliberal market and post-Fordism.
Entrepreneurial skills help students as future artists contend with how
to survive better and transform more readily within a competitive art mar-
ket by presenting their work in more accessible ways, networking them-
selves, and translating their artistic skills into business plans or funding
proposals (Ozgun 2011, p. 121). In effect, educators are encouraging the
“enterprising self” (Simons 2002, p. 619). Art education in this instance
is mobilized toward individualistic and entrepreneurial ends that further
buttress the valorization of neoliberal imperatives.
According to Gielen (2010), “[t]oday, creativity, innovation, authen-
ticity and even idiosyncrasy are embraced by the business world and gov-
ernments alike” (p. 2), taking the artistic from the margins to the heart of
society with hopes of global economic competitiveness. As Virno (2012)
affirms (after Schumpeter [1943/2003]), “[a]n entrepreneur is someone
who manages to combine given elements in a new way” (p. 45), much like
the processes inherent in artistic production. In fact, the artist “seems to
embody that successful combination of an unlimited diversity of ideas,
creativity-on-call and smart self-marketing that today is demanded of
everyone” (von Osten 2011, p. 137). Moreover,

the ‘artist’ whose way of working is based on self-responsibility, creativity

and spontaneity, … grounds the slogans of today’s discourse on labor. …
The classical subject of exception, with its precarious employment situation,
has thus been discursively transformed into a model economic actor. (von
Osten 2011, p. 137).

Artrepreneurs
The individual is the hero of neoliberalism advanced by entrepreneurial
freedoms such as free trade and unencumbered markets. According to
McRobbie (2001/2013), this individualization in the cultural field
coalesces three components: “the individual, creativity (now extended to
mean ‘having ideas’) and freedom. The aim is to cultivate self-sufficient
individuals whose efforts will not be hindered by the administrations of
the state” (p. 59). Accordingly, artists are increasingly referred to or self-­
identifying as creative entrepreneurs or artrepreneurs because of their
30   N.M. KALIN

capacities for wealth creation and urban regeneration.8 In this age of the
artrepreneur, artists are viewed as employing an industrious playfulness
and novel flexibility in response to changing socio-environmental demands
(Mylonas 2012) and fragmentation (Relyea 2013).
Artrepreneurs are characterized as self-reliant, not needing ‘handouts’
from anyone as they run on ambition and self-initiative. This free agent
bares a striking resemblance to the “stereotype of the artist as lone genius
or heroic individual” (Relyea 2013, p. 81). Artrepreneurs are so mobile
and adaptable that they do not seem to rely on the “conditions necessary
for bringing about social justice, such as the stability and enclosure
required for determining collectivities, or ‘wholes,’ that can be measured
by, and held accountable to, the yardstick of across-the-board fairness”
(Relyea 2013, p. 7). Forms such as unions, political parties, or institutions
are too stationary and rigid to transform to meet ever-changing market
conditions—they aren’t nimble enough to be truly enterprising, try as
they might.
This risk-taking sensibility so synonymous with artists could seem at
odds with a neoliberal efficiency model as risk taking increasingly must live
up to the test of neoliberal realism and instrumentalization in the cost-­
effective fulfillment of bringing a proposed art work to form. As Gielen
(2013) warns,

[u]topia is out of the question in this ideology of realism. Worse still, what-
ever cannot be measured is soon set aside as impracticable and too utopian.
The urgent call for an awareness of reality obliterates the breathing space for
an awareness of what is possible. (p. 44)

Harvie (2013) even goes so far as to claim that neoliberalism is “radically

reconfiguring what an artist is expected to be and, in so doing, putting the
value of being an artist at serious ideological risk” (p. 62). As the reason-
ing goes, the usefulness of artists in a post-Fordist, creative economy is
their ability to initiate problem solving and innovate new ideas while being
independent and productive even during times of dwindling public and
financial support. This may be an accurate description of artistic practice,
but the entrepreneurial pressure exerted from the hegemonic expectations
imposed by neoliberal capitalism on artists and art carries with it poten-
tially detrimental effects.
   EDUCATING THE ARTREPRENEUR    31

Artensions
When artists capitulate to the neoliberal demand of innovation for innova-
tion’s sake, they risk damaging art and culture through prioritizing self-­
interest and obliging art to relentlessly “pursue productivity, permanent
growth and profit” (Harvie 2013, p. 63). In this way, artistic modes are
being appropriated for neoliberal capitalism, yet in the process art is also
being transformed. As Relyea (2013) lays out in his book Everyday Art
World, the DIY movement thoroughly demonstrates a neo-­entrepreneurial
exemplar in its opportunistic interventions through endless negotiation
and improvised adaptations within systems toward temporary projects and
last-minute solutions. This mode of flexibility and conciliation furthers the
multi-skilling and de-specialization of artrepreneurs. Acting as free agents,
artists using post-studio practices offer “new on-demand, just-in-time
modes of production and distribution” (Relyea 2013, p.  9) that favor
short-term projects over long-term productions.
McRobbie (2001/2013) claims that the speed with which creative
entrepreneurs are to respond and innovate within a business ethos runs
counter to traditional versions of creativity that have instead “been nur-
tured in interiorised, slow and quiet mental and physical spaces” (p. 60).
While

in the new cultural economy it is encouraged to be increasingly populist,

noisy, easy, thin … Where there is little or no time for thinking, the art-work
itself can hardly be thoughtful. … The constant temptation is to drain artis-
tic work of complexity, confining it instead to a clichéd and commercially
conformist. (McRobbie 2001/2013, p. 60)

Under neoliberal pressure, art’s practices, structures, and subjectivities

are reconfigured—not unlike what we are experiencing with art education
itself—“in ways that potentially extend [neoliberalism’s] effects while
simultaneously, dangerously, naturalizing them” (Harvie 2013, p.  65).
Ultimately, this omnipresent entrepreneurialism devalues art for democ-
racy. Taken to the extreme, the artist as entrepreneur chances depoliticiz-
ing the subjectivities and criticalities associated with artistic identities. The
neoliberal demand that artists succumb to the entrepreneurial urge coerces
them to focus on productivity to the detriment of other cultural values
such as reimagining society beyond free markets. Art and artists in this way
risk tailoring themselves and their work narrowly to entrepreneurial ends.
32   N.M. KALIN

The worry here is that in the cultivation and conscription of entrepreneur-

ial artists, we jeopardize promoting the further individualization of soci-
ety, “emphasized in ways that damage social relations and principles of
social equality” to the point where the challenging of the dominant politi-
cal economy is quashed (Harvie 2013, p. 77).
Art, like freedom, when narrowed to the liberty of as free a market as
possible, “radically constrains both choices and ambitions” so that within
the economization of life “no longer is there an open question of how to
craft the self or what paths to travel in life” (Brown 2015, p. 41). There
are only economic versions of us and entrepreneurial paths to travel (see
Deresiewicz 2015). This feeds into “the narcissistic, post-political self, and
the desires of success sustained by commodity culture” (Mylonas 2012,
p. 1). Peers (2011) warns that the restraints imposed by the free market on
disciplines such as art confine these forms of knowledge to quantifiable
competencies, with any other priorities viewed “as restraining rather than
affording freedom to the human subject” (p. 421). The adage is that if it
doesn’t progress the freedom of the market, then it detracts from it and
needs to be excluded from the repertoire of worthwhile skills.
Art’s absorption into business predictably sounds the stagnation of art
as a critical practice.9 Art risks morphing to neoliberal rationality as it
comes under an instrumental gaze stealthily searching for entrepreneurial
innovation, thereby placing art and its critical potential for socio-political
intervention under extreme compression (Mylonas 2012, pp.  3–4). As
entrepreneurs set about solving problems for economic advantage, the
farthest goal from this agenda is the disruption and problematizing or the
causing of problems more commonly associated with artistic practice
(Gielen 2013, p. 38).
Art is now embraced by late capitalism as a “mode of value produc-
tion, consumption and reproduction of capital” (Mylonas 2012, p. 5).
This entrepreneurialization also characterizes creativity “as the outcome
of a competitive market process (and not of a labour process)” (Gielen
2013, p. 103). Artrepreneurs “resign themselves to the limits imposed
upon them by the demands of industrial efficiency and the market. They
content themselves with creativism as such” (Gielen 2013, p.  103).10
Regardless of this resignation, as many artists and art educators under-
stand, art needs time to breathe. Change for the sake of change, con-
tinual innovation, pathological orientation toward entrepreneurialism,
ever-accelerated adaptation, all under the expectations of neoliberal
   EDUCATING THE ARTREPRENEUR    33

efficiency, negate the aimless and experimental space of art-making that

might stretch beyond the trappings of market culture.
What do we lose in narrowing art education toward artrepreneurial
education that places every learning objective against the criteria of
employability and marketability? Peers (2011) offers a fitting diagnosis:
“how children should learn to be artistic is a signal of how dramatically the
market seeks to stabilise the function of education and the kind of freedom
available to humanity” (p. 424). There is, it would appear, a lot to lose.

Relatively Autonomous Art and Its Education

In the regression of art to production and neoliberal logic, wherein the
consumer, financier, client, or user pre-dictates an art work according to
need, taste, or ego, the deterioration of skepticism and wonder enabled by
art accelerates. Within neoliberalism, whatever was left of art’s critical
autonomy is being undermined as its analytical capacities atrophy under
conformity to the market. Might it be that conformity is replacing con-
sciousness in art and its education today?11
Instead of protecting liberal democratic freedoms, neoliberalism has
focused on the management of economic liberties through increasingly
open markets. Léger (2013) deduces that this “autonomy of the market
replaces the avant-garde notion of the critical autonomy of the work of art
as part of a critique of economic determinism and class inequality” (p. 52).
Further, according to Brown (2015), neoliberal rationality has
eliminated

“the good life” (Aristotle) or “the true realm of freedom” (Marx), by which
they did not mean luxury, leisure, or indulgence, but rather the cultivation
and expression of distinctly human capacities for ethical and political free-
dom, creativity, unbounded reflection, or invention. (p. 43)

Conformism to the market is parasitic to the flourishing of these human

capacities. As Harris (2014) argues, even creativity in schools

is being co-opted by an entrepreneurial imperative, colonised by market-

place concerns, and ideologically gentrified to death. The danger is not that
schools will lose their ability to invite learners into creative and innovative
spaces, but rather that we will teach them that the only productive creative
endeavour is a profitable one. (pp. 27–28)
34   N.M. KALIN

At this impasse, I find myself asking: What if art education, despite

all of these pressures and foils, conceived creativity education as having
an “antithetical relationship to global capitalism and neoliberalism”
(Adams and Owens 2016, p. 6)? Is there any mode to counter the capi-
talization of creativity and art for economic gain alone? Is there a space
for the non-­instrumentalist or non-vocationalizationist approaches to
visual art and its education? What if art educators refused to submit to
the stagnation of art through its economization? Despite neoliberal
inculcation, we are not helpless; we still have a choice to not train the
sole aim of art toward capital gain as if we have no other options or
agency.
The critical role of art, given its due freedom, may hold hope through
its power to reveal our untruths or surface a lack in opposition to aspects
of our current society. For according to Adorno (1970/2004), “art
must be and wants to be utopia, and the more utopia is blocked by the
real functional order, the more this is true” (p.  41). Especially under
neoliberalism, this utopia is a place for non-productivity and uselessness.
Art that is oppositional to the present may act as a “placeholder for uto-
pia” (Leslie 2011, p. 187) in that it opens up our current circumstances
to the future, which is the realm of hope (Bolaños 2007, p. 30). This
utopian possibility offered by art is always negative, pointing to our cur-
rent lack, “for it will not allow itself to be justified in terms of naïve
conceptions of humanism, teleology, and divine providence. … Praying
for our future will not help us, our openness towards it might” (Bolaños
2007, p. 31).
This runs parallel to notions of art’s autonomy to remain outside of
societal rationality and ideology. Art’s pure autonomy is a myth, but its
relative autonomy (Ray 2011, p. 175) might be more of a possibility for
resistance. As noted above, artistic autonomy has been undermined while
being absorbed into neoliberal rationality. However, this absorption is not
a fait accommpli.

Relatively autonomous art … goes on—and insofar as it does, it remains

different from the merely calculated production of cultural commodities.
Such an art shares the social guilt and is always scarred by the dominant
social logics it tries to refuse. Still, by its very attempts at difference, it acti-
vates a relative autonomy and actualizes a force of resistance. (Ray 2011,
p. 175)
   EDUCATING THE ARTREPRENEUR    35

Likewise, Baldacchino (2013) maintains that only critical and provisional

forms of creativity might “counter productivism and instrumentalism in
the name of art’s autonomy” (p. 350).
To my mind, art education needs to claim and activate a form of this
relative autonomy in the face of entrepreneurial mandates that maintain
innovation and creativity toward their ends alone. The features of relative
autonomy, as a condition of resistance, will depend on specific contextual
factors for individual art educators and their students. What if, as art edu-
cators, we considered it our jobs to work within a system while also
attempting possible practices of resistance based on our struggle for rela-
tive autonomy?
Most art educators I have come across work the numerous and contra-
dictory fractures characteristic of neoliberal schooling in relation to their
own professional loss of autonomy or to their own students’ loss of free-
dom. The entrepreneurialization of art education is setting in, but this
predicament is not without possibilities for the flexing of relative auton-
omy in relation to neoliberal rationality, for it “is fissured by the tensions
and antagonisms that plague any hierarchical system” (Ray 2011, p. 176).
These do not fulfill instances of best practice to be shared as exemplars—
they are often covert, precarious, and unplanned in a delicate dance with
school management that does not adhere to a one-size-fits-all model. As
Ray (2011) reminds us, “[p]essimism may be justified but need not freeze
us: … there is always something to be done” (p. 176).

Close-Out
In this chapter, I’ve laid out and challenged the entrepreneurialization of
art education under way at this time. Neoliberalism has become seamlessly
naturalized into the common sense of our lives, politics, institutions, prac-
tices, discourses, subjectivities, and identities. Yet for me, P21’s push for
entrepreneurial, financial, and business literacy through art education
marks a turning point in the conversion of art education practices and
artistic labor toward increasingly economized ends. In the above, I’ve
offered my efforts to comprehend and review the dynamics of our present
circumstances. I’ve endeavored to denaturalize how entrepreneurialism’s
priorities of greater individualism, productivity, and innovation play out
within art and educational practices while holding serious implications for
collective values and shared responsibilities in our current society.
36   N.M. KALIN

Notes
1. In a related development, a 2016 report created by the Center for Cultural
Innovation for National Endowment for the Arts titled Creativity connects:
Trends and conditions affecting U.S. artists, it was recommended that
twenty-first-century training systems be created to better enable “artists to
realize their creative potential” (p. 21). Among the specific suggestions for
academic training programs such as those located in art schools are the
inclusion of business and entrepreneurship training within the core cur-
riculum to better prepare artists in articulating and applying their compe-
tencies across a variety of disciplines as well as community and business
contexts (Center for Cultural Innovation for National Endowment for the
Arts 2016).
2. During Foucault’s courses at the Collège de France, he focused on entre-
preneurship and the entrepreneurial self in his analysis of neoliberalism and
governmentality.
3. P21’s (Partnership for 21st Century Learning 2015) prioritizing of such
Life and Career Skills as Self-Direction, Productivity and Accountability,
and Leadership and Responsibility related to art education strongly reflects
an incorporation of the management of self-conduct in line with neoliberal
entrepreneurialized education. I develop this further in Chap. 3.
4. This common Thatcher quote originally appeared in Keay (1987).
5. Upon my first reading of P21’s interdisciplinary themes of Global
Awareness; Financial, Economic, Business and Entrepreneurial Literacy;
Civic Literacy; Health Literacy; and Environmental Literacy (Partnership
for 21st Century Skills n.d.), I was amazed at how education is being
responsibilized to take on these topics, potentially in the place of govern-
mental action.
6. Findings that should be sobering to entrepreneurial enthusiasts are located
in economists David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald’s (1998) essay
“What Makes an Entrepreneur?” The crux of their discovery is summed up
in the following quote: “the probability of self-employment depends posi-
tively upon whether the individual ever received an inheritance or gift”
(p. 26).
7. It bears stating that since innovation and creativity are largely concerned
with turning preset outcomes on their heads, the neoliberal paradox is
extended further here as the standardization of entrepreneurialism, like the
standardization of art, constrains its actual potential.
8. For example, see Project Row Houses 2015/16 undertaking “Round 43:
Small Business/Big Change: Economic Perspectives from Artists and
Artrepreneurs.”
9. Many might claim that we are currently experiencing this with the ascent
of design thinking in art education.
   EDUCATING THE ARTREPRENEUR    37

10. Creativism is creativity under neoliberalism “stripped of its critical poten-

tial” (Gielen 2013, p. 96).
11. I come to this question inspired by Adorno’s (1991, p. 104) assessment of
the culture industry.

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Ray, G. (2011). Culture industry and the administration of terror. In G. Raunig,
G. Ray, & U. Wuggenig (Eds.), Critique of creativity: Precarity, subjectivity and
resistance in the ‘creative industries’ (pp. 167–181). London: MayFlyBooks.
Relyea, L. (2013). Your everyday art world. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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is now scrapping grades. Reuters. Retrieved from http://fortune.
com/2017/01/09/singapore-schools-education-grades/. Accessed 27 July
2017.
Rose-Redwood, R.  B. (2006). Governmentality, geography, and the geo-coded
world. Progress in Human Geography, 30(4), 469–486.
Round 43: Small Business/Big Change: Economic Perspectives from Artists and
Artrepreneurs. (n.d.). In On view | Project Row Houses. Retrieved from https://
projectrowhouses.org/press-releases/round-43. Accessed 27 July 2016.
Rubin, C.  M. (2014, December 8). The global search for education: Creative
China—Part 2. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/c-m-rubin/
the-global-search-for-edu_b_6285838.html. Accessed 27 July 2017.
Schumpeter, J.  A. (2003). Capitalism, socialism & democracy. New  York:
Routledge. (Original work published in 1943)
Simons, M. (2002). Governmentality, education and quality management: Toward
a critique of the permanent quality tribunal. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft,
5(4), 617–633.
Simons, M., & Masschelein, J. (2006). The learning society and governmentality:
An introduction. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 38(4), 417–430.
Simons, M., & Masschelein, J. (2008). The governmentalization of learning and
the assemblage of a learning apparatus. Educational Theory, 58(4), 391–415.
Teng, A. (2016, April 17). Going beyond grades: Evolving the Singapore educa-
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singapore/education/going-beyond-grades-evolving-the-singapore-educa-
tion-system. Accessed 27 July 2017.
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Virno, P. (2012). The dismeasure of art. An interview with Paolo Virno/

Interviewer S. Lavaert & P. Gielen. In P. Gielen & P. De Bruyne (Eds.), Being
an artist in post-fordist times (2nd ed., pp. 19–46). Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.
von Osten, M. (2011). Unpredictable outcomes / unpredictable outcasts: On
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 CHAPTER 3

Governmentality and Post-Fordist Art

Education

Abstract  This chapter bears down on neoliberal ideology’s influence on

contemporary conceptions of creativity and its education. Under the pres-
ent post-Fordist system of economic production, artists—with their drive
to innovate, flexible production practices, and tolerance for precarity—are
being upheld as ideal workers. The resulting requirements of immaterial
labor have obliged the restructuring of education through forms of neo-
liberal governmentality that set about instilling specific values and urgen-
cies manifesting in the governmentalization of learning and economization
of education. In my consideration of the convergence of these pressures I
focus on how the Partnership for 21st Century Skills mandates the accel-
eration of post-Fordist economic goals for art education through govern-
ment of self and others that greatly reduces the possibilities for the
nurturing of creativity.

Keywords  Creativity • Neoliberalism • Governmentality • Post-Fordism

• Foucault

In this chapter, I take up a more detailed examination of the topics out-

lined in previous chapters. I am interested in how we got here—how art
education became so single-mindedly connected with employability and
capital. How do we understand the neoliberal times we are in as educators

© The Author(s) 2018 41

N.M. Kalin, The Neoliberalization of Creativity Education,
Creativity, Education and the Arts,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71525-4_3
42   N.M. KALIN

of art? How has art education become a reflection of these circumstances

to the point where few might even venture to conceive of alternatives to
neoliberal versions of art education?
As I hear other art educators claim the field has failed to adequately
teach creativity in response to changing economic needs and we urgently
need to devise best practice solutions to meet these changes, I, for one,
am stuck on the nature of the changes with which we are supposed to
hurry up and comply. In response, the following is a partial story I’ve
come to tell myself and others pulled from Foucault’s articulations of
governmentality, economic theories, art writing, educational philosophy,
and political theory. One barometer of educational change can be found
in national standards associated with GERM. In my analysis of contem-
porary art education, I’m drawn again to P21 and how this framework
ingeniously wraps itself around art education. In particular, I consider
how art education as articulated in P21’s Map for the Arts (Partnership
for 21st Century Skills n.d.) reflects the “governmentalization of learn-
ing” (Simons and Masschelein 2008, p. 393) through processes of gov-
erning the self and others. I begin by laying out how these changes are
grounded in the transformation from Fordism to post-Fordist produc-
tion practices.

From Fordism to Post-Fordism

Starting in the 1970s, Fordist labor models—with hierarchical structures,
unions, manual labor processes, separation of personal and professional
lives, material products, worker specialization (often on assembly lines),
and set working hours within factories—transformed into post-Fordist
modes of production. Within this new form of post-industrial capitalism,
immaterial labor is defined “as the labor that produces the informational
and cultural content of the commodity” (Lazzarato 1996, p. 132), includ-
ing cultural and artistic goods or intellectual property. Whereas Fordism
utilized centralized control over the production of commercial goods,
post-Fordism favors decentralization in the creation of immaterial labor.
This immaterial, intellectual, artistic, and cultural labor was the domain of
the bourgeoisie up until the end of the 1970s when society began to expe-
rience a “mass intellectuality” which started the democratization of intel-
lectual work and the increasingly intellectualized requirements of
production (Lazzarato 1996, pp.  132–133). This global socioeconomic
situation has been facilitated by managerial and technological innovations
   GOVERNMENTALITY AND POST-FORDIST ART EDUCATION    43

within industrialized nations that are supported by neoliberal economic

policy in the collapsing of culture, economics, politics, and the social.
In response to these changes, post-Fordism has been able to develop
new conceptions of the organization of immaterial productivity. Under
Fordism, there was routine, rigidity, and repetition to labor that eased the
efficient processes of production, as in an assembly line within a Ford car
factory. Post-Fordism necessitates the opposite as immaterial production
processes opportunistically respond to continuous modifications in con-
sumer taste as well as technological innovations. Immaterial labor

forces us to question the classical definitions of work and workforce, because

it results from a synthesis of different types of know-how: intellectual skills,
manual skills, and entrepreneurial skills. Immaterial labor constitutes itself in
immediately collective forms that exist as networks and flows. (Lazzarato
1996, p. 144)

Just like the market, these networks and flows are constantly shifting in
time and location. As David Harvey (1989) states, “the more flexible
motion of capital emphasizes the new, the fleeting, the ephemeral, the
fugitive, and the contingent in modern life, rather than the more solid
values implanted under Fordism” (p.  171). Flexibility is an incredibly
important aspect of post-Fordism. This is a reaction to fast-paced changes
in consumer behavior making labor specialization susceptible to redun-
dancy and detrimental to work security.
Workers in this scenario must be active subjects competent in self-­
management, communication, cooperation, and creativity because the
nature of their work is not executed on command and to the standards of
a manager within pre-set, rigid, and specific job responsibilities. Instead,
productivity requires the functions of production to be innovated by the
workers themselves. Therefore, the laborer “is to be responsible for his or
her own control and motivation within the work group without a foreman
needing to intervene, and the foreman’s role is redefined into that of a
facilitator” (Lazzarato 1996, p. 135).
While immaterial labor does not need a factory, as it can operate any-
where, it does, however, involve the worker’s brain as the site of produc-
tion (Gielen 2010, p. 19). Understandably, then, communication in the
post-Fordian context is also of central importance as the sharing of knowl-
edge and ideas is essential to purveyors of the immaterial who often have
to work collaboratively in ever-changing groups. Moreover, immaterial
44   N.M. KALIN

labor favors small “productive units” for particular ad hoc project work
that form and produce only when required and in response to capitalist
request, but “once the job has been done, the cycle dissolves back into the
networks and flows that make possible the reproduction and enrichment
of its productive capacities” (Lazzarato 1996, p. 136).
Within our current post-Fordist era there is an embrace of specific
immaterial labor known as the creative economies or creative industries1
under the perception that cultural production is primarily an economic
activity. Creative industries can include the following areas: music, fine arts
and its market, graphic arts, architecture, literature, games, software, mul-
timedia, fashion, print media, publishing, the audiovisual field, design,
software, museums, performing arts, entertainment, libraries, and adver-
tising. In the reorganization of corporate structures associated with late
capitalism, there has been a shift from managing workers on the factory
floor toward the management of intellectual capital and creative assets
through harnessing immaterial production.
Creative industries “rationalize ‘immaterial’ cultural production accord-
ing to flexible production strategies that benefit capital accumulation”
(Léger 2013, p. 52). Such a creativity-based economy captures creativity
as intellectual property based in the cultural sectors for their potential
market growth, promotion of innovation, and job opportunities. The
development of this thrust into the creative industries reflects the growth
in cultural production and its injection into economic life, including urban
regeneration (Gill and Pratt 2013).2 As McRobbie (2001/2013) further
contextualizes in the following:

[o]ne of the central features of the modern urban economy is the explosive
growth in the numbers of people making a living through culture and the
arts. The old supports of employment—manufacturing and public services
(teaching, health, civil service)—are in numerical decline or losing their for-
mer status, and along with them have disappeared the reality and expecta-
tion of lifetime employment with a single organisation. And as these sectors
have been hollowed out, new sources and patterns of employment have
arisen—whose common point of reference is often the spreading category of
“culture.” (p. 58)

What is intriguing to me is the elevated desire for multi-skilled labor

and seeming disregard for professional expertise: “[o]n the contrary,
what’s required is the ability to anticipate unexpected opportunities and
coincidences, to seize chances that present themselves, to move with the
   GOVERNMENTALITY AND POST-FORDIST ART EDUCATION    45

world” (Virno 2012, p.  33). This presents a kind of skills-on-demand

where workers continually get re-skilled as demanded by the job market
that appears to need less and less single-skill-based labor, or else jobs
themselves are increasingly de-skilled (Martin 2008). In addition to and/
or instead of expertise, extended focus, and depth of specific know-how,
multi-tasking related to diffuse and short-term projects calls for a contin-
ual reinvention of productive synergies. Therefore, as reflective of our
post-industrial economic period, employers within immaterial labor “focus
on qualities such as communication skills, eloquence, creativity and
authenticity … and physical and mental mobility” (Gielen 2010, p. 2). In
response, creativity has taken on a business mode toward capitalist ends.

Artist as the Ideal Worker

These qualities thought of as ideal within post-Fordist labor are also of
central value to the art world. This strikes me as a fascinating develop-
ment. By dissolving previous separations between artistic and wage labor,
post-Fordism “incorporates production methods, value forms and circula-
tion systems that have hitherto been considered as means of cultural and
artistic production” (Ozgun 2011, p. 107). The features of flexibility, net-
working, hybridity, sociality, decentralization of structures, and inventive-
ness synonymous with artistic practice are commodified competencies of
immaterial labor put to efficient use under post-Fordism. In fact, Gielen
(2010) goes so far as to claim that the modern art world appears to have
acted as a laboratory for post-Fordist logics. A key front in the post-­
industrialization of artistic labor by post-Fordism has been the coloniza-
tion of creativity and innovation for economic ambitions.
While the art world and the artist have inspired a post-Fordist concep-
tion of labor, according to Relyea (2013), post-Fordism and the creative
industries have sold themselves as

basically an “artistic” revolution, promising an end to Fordist conformity

and standardization via a more fulfilling life of individual autonomy, per-
sonal initiative, creative spontaneity and self-realization. It is precisely the
euphemism of a “creative life,” or the metonymic association of artistic cre-
ativity … that provides ideological cover for the shift in labor conditions to
more chronically intermittent employment with longer work hours and no
benefits. Artists and designers are made into role models for the highly
motivated, underpaid, short-term and subcontracted creative types who
46   N.M. KALIN

neoliberals imagine will staff their fantasy of a fully freelance economy—

what ex-Al Gore speechwriter Daniel Pink has titled “Free Agent Nation.”
(pp. 10–11)

According to Penzin (2010), the subjectivity of a contemporary artist is an

“expression of the flexible, mobile, non-specialized substance of contem-
porary ‘living labor’” (p. 81). Although this freedom from routine, rigid-
ity, discipline, and location may provide a sense of self-control over
individual actions, this can also be easily exploited by the cultural indus-
tries. With increased flexibilization of work comes increased precarity.
These very freedoms also generate the burden of individual workers taking
on all the risks and stresses associated with precarious working conditions
imposed by post-industrialism (Hardt and Negri 2000). Moreover, auton-
omy under these logics encompasses when and how intelligence is pro-
duced and collaboration is instigated. This amounts to the fallacy of
autonomy and sovereignty to choose the terms of one’s own self-­
precarization, which is, in the end, less a free decision to choose working
conditions and more of a neoliberal governmental phenomenon of bait
and switch (Lorey 2006). As Virno (2012) pointedly states,

[i]t is a condition for my exploitation that I produce intelligence and col-

laboration, and I can only do so when I am, to some degree, free. So I need
to be granted a certain degree of autonomy in order to be exploited. (p. 33)

Ultimately this freelance economy has been characterized by “flexploi-

tation” (de Peuter 2011, p. 419) as employers only pay for what they need
through temporary work, part-time employment, and short-term con-
tracts, thereby effectively placing risk onto individuals instead of society or
corporations (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999/2005). To summarize, the
instrumentalization of arts and culture has become a priority for capital-
ization and economic policy, as well as a model for labor that normalizes
precariousness and flexibility as in the rise of the gig economy.3 It is against
this economic backdrop that we come to better appreciate art education
in its current predicaments and perceptions.

Neoliberalized Art Education for Post-Fordism

As a global ideology, neoliberalism is now so ubiquitous that business val-
ues could be considered our new normal wherein aspects of our lives are
continually assessed for their potential capital. “Neoliberalism governs as
   GOVERNMENTALITY AND POST-FORDIST ART EDUCATION    47

sophisticated common sense, a reality principle remaking institutions and

human beings everywhere it settles, nestles, and gains affirmation” (Brown
2015, p. 35), slowly “economizing” (p. 21) activities previously not con-
sidered within its purview. For example, education is assessed in regard to
its return on investment of time and money on the part of students and
their parents. Under neoliberal logic, every facet of society has to be self-­
sufficient or, better yet, make a profit to be worthwhile. Institutions such
as public schools and universities have an important role to play here as
they are considered primarily as a pipeline to the economy, while these
institutions also endure the additional pressure of reduced state support
for public services.
The message is, as educators are charged with producing students that
will enable nations to remain competitive economically, schools need to be
transformed to prepare students for the post-Fordist working environ-
ment. Education for cultivating a broadly educated citizenry comes out a
loser under these metrics. Humanist values such as education for the pub-
lic, social, and common good are belittled in place of education conceived
as an investment in job training that needs to yield a return in future
income. Both curriculum and pedagogy need to now adhere to facilitating
marketable outcomes.
Art and its education have become increasingly porous to these cur-
rents. As De Bruyne (2012) articulates, the definition of art has changed
as “the word has come to mean something very broad and vague, inter-
changeable with culture, creativity, [or] artsy skills” (p. 147). Moreover, in
Virno’s (2012) view, art now “belongs to post-Fordist production and
economic life” (p. 46). Clearly art education is one of the main conduits
to the creative industries, and this is perhaps an enviable position as more
and more it seems that art education’s very survival relies on the extent to
which it can be reformed to advance economic purposes. Predictably, the
rhetoric of post-Fordism has already taken root with some urgency in the
field of art education as its purposes and contexts are aligning with this
new production mode. As a consequence, art as social critique, critical
pedagogy, and theory is devalued and suspended with the push for creativ-
ity and intellectual labor as productivity within forms of creative education
(McRobbie 2007).
Private enterprise not only influences governments and society, but
through state reforms it also places pressure on the value, rationale,
funding, labor, curriculum, pedagogies, assessment, and perceptions of
art education. Educators are being coerced to conceive of students as
48   N.M. KALIN

human capital (Brown 2015) and to transform art education to this

end. Art education in this way is driven by economic growth so that it
might be useful within post-Fordist labor and return on investment for
students/consumers/investors looking for jobs and economic
­advantages. For a complementary explanation of how we got to this
point in society and art education, I turn now to Foucault’s notion of
governmentality.

Governmentality and Schooling
How does neoliberalism trickle its economic policy down to place pressure
on art education? Education often fits in with the social norms propagated
by the state according to whatever ideology is adopted by a specific gov-
ernment. This social rationality of governing started in the twentieth cen-
tury with education becoming a governmental concern reflecting
governmental responsibility to intervene between the relations of educa-
tion and society’s social and cultural concerns. Education can be harnessed
as the mechanism through which societal issues can be alleviated—for
instance, workforce issues are translated into vocationalization of curricu-
lar reform. Therefore, “the ‘governmentalization of education’ in the
name of the social should be regarded as a main component in the ‘educa-
tionalization of society’” (Simons and Masschelein 2008, p.  395). This
governmentalization of education reaches toward a governmentalization
of learning, as I will address below.
As Michel Foucault (2004/2009) articulated in his later works, neolib-
eralism, acting as the ideological backbone of post-Fordism, advances
through the reform of long-held boundaries between work and leisure,
everyday language, concepts, and identities, intervening as a form of gov-
ernmentality renegotiating the social field. Foucault’s governmentality
encompasses government of the self and of others. Under neoliberalism,
the market is now the organizing principle of governmentality that restruc-
tures the state, society, and schooling as apparatus to recode technologies
of the self, such as self-determination and freedom of choice.
Schooling is essential in this governmentality as principles of the private
sector restructure education according to business priorities and manage-
ment principles. In the case of neoliberal schooling, Foucault’s govern-
mentality plays out in the state’s desire to produce citizens that will best
meet their mandate through governmental strategies imposed on the pop-
ulation and through modes of self-government. As a component of the
   GOVERNMENTALITY AND POST-FORDIST ART EDUCATION    49

governmentalization of learning, learning encompasses both self-­

government and government of others coupled as freedom and domina-
tion—the self is involved, implying a practice of freedom, but those
self-controlled acts are presupposed and funneled into a specific form of
subjectivity mandated by the government regime in line with the domi-
nant neoliberal ideology. Learning in this frame is “that which guarantees
self-government and that which at the same time renders us, and society
as a whole, governable” (Simons and Masschelein 2008, p.  393).
Government sets the terms for your autonomy—“What is asked within the
social regime of governing is to discipline oneself in view of social norms”
(Simons and Masschelein 2008, p.  394). This governmentalization of
learning plays out poignantly within the school as “learning apparatus”
where learning as capital is something that is the responsibility of the
learner who should manage this learning with an eye to eventual employ-
ability (Simons and Masschelein 2008, p. 391).
If learning is what is required to be employable, then learning is a sort
of capital that learners are now responsible for accessing and managing in
order to enhance their future earning potentials. In this way, education
through governmental strategies aims to provide a flexible labor market to
meet the needs of post-Fordism. Economies dependent on knowledge
and intellectual labor rely on lifelong learning so that individual workers
have the autonomy to meet their own needs toward self-actualization
within the changing landscape of labor and production processes. Under
this governmental regime, the government is “responsible for offering
education infrastructures and learning opportunities and for stimulating
learning, learning itself is framed as the task and responsibility of individu-
als themselves” (Simons and Masschelein 2008, p. 405).

At the level of the teaching process, a new vocabulary is thus set in motion,
which constructs teaching as a sort of learning management, as the arrange-
ment and steering of learning situations, in which it is ultimately up to the
individual to make the best of it (or to fail to do so). (Pongratz 2006,
p. 478)

In a sense, students are “learning to learn” (Simons 2006, p. 537) in line

with what the job market requires. This self-governing implies individual
freedom to monitor one’s development as a learner. These tendencies
toward governmentality are acutely displayed within GERM across the
globe. P21’s initiatives for education are but one model.
50   N.M. KALIN

Business Lives Here: P21’s Map for the Arts

Educational reforms such as those associated with GERM reflect govern-
mental priorities. Art educators, in turn, are shaping students’ conduct in
particular ways that align with a neoliberal governmental ethos. To my
reading, the initiatives of P21 ardently display neoliberal governmentality
at work through the self and on others.
Under the Life and Career Skills of P21 (Partnership for 21st Century
Learning 2015), art educators are supposed to assist students in develop-
ing such productive characteristics for labor as Flexibility and Adaptability
related to various artistic contexts, Initiative and Self-Direction as artists/
learners, Social and Cross-Cultural Skills through teamwork, Productivity
and Accountability on art projects, as well as Leadership and Responsibility
to solve problems that benefit the larger community through art. In my
view, P21’s prioritizing of career skills places the responsibility of career
readiness on the shoulders of students—now achieved through self-­
constraint instead of being “achieved through direct external constraint or
internalised authority” (Pongratz 2006, p.  477) such as a dictatorial
teacher. In fact, four of the five Life and Career Skills of P21 could fall
under the “learning to learn” (Simons 2006, p. 537) classification, includ-
ing Flexibility and Adaptability, Initiative and Self-Direction, Productivity
and Accountability, as well as Leadership and Responsibility. Within
Productivity and Accountability, students are expected to “set goals,
accept responsibility, and refine their work to meet high standards of
excellence and accountability” including “delivering high-quality work on
time” as well as “[d]emonstrating diligence and a positive work ethic (e.g.,
being punctual and reliable)” (Partnership for 21st Century Skills n.d.,
p. 14). Under the skills of Initiative and Self-Direction, in order for stu-
dents to continuously improve themselves as artists, they are required to
demonstrate a “commitment to learning as a lifelong process” (Partnership
for 21st Century Skills n.d., p. 12). The expected outcome for Initiative
and Self-Direction states, “[s]tudents will be motivated, self-directed, and
reflective learners, who independently manage their goals and time to con-
tinuously improve as artists” (Partnership for 21st Century Skills n.d.,
p.  12). This includes monitoring their self-understanding and learning
needs, taking initiative to expand their own skills beyond mastery, self-­
managing their time efficiently, and “[d]efining, prioritizing, and com-
pleting tasks without direct oversight” (Partnership for 21st Century Skills
n.d., p 12). As Simons and Masschelein (2008) suggest, “[t]his could be
   GOVERNMENTALITY AND POST-FORDIST ART EDUCATION    51

regarded as an attitude of ‘responsibilization’ toward learning” (p. 399)

with learners responsible for managing their own learning throughout the
process.
This amounts to students being coerced into “voluntary self-control,”
placing them in the role of “knowledge self-managers” “for whom success
is held out particularly when they acquire the qualities of modern manage-
ment: acquiring the means of production for the creation of knowledge
(learning to learn), subjecting themselves to the self-constraint of perma-
nent quality control and optimisation (motivation management)”
(Pongratz 2006, p. 477). The teacher is less of an expert in this environ-
ment and more of a facilitator or project leader who provides opportuni-
ties for students to demonstrate their skills and evaluates how well students
self-manage. While this seems a more egalitarian relationship between stu-
dent and educator than more autocratic models, there is still a limited
playing field of what matters—the structure itself is in place as a form of
neoliberal governmentality with narrow boundaries of life skills focused
exclusively on employability and future income, albeit now through pro-
fessionalized and economized versions of art and creativity education. In
education and post-Fordist labor, this governmentality is a process of
assimilating self-governmentality; as the economization of education goes,
so goes the economization of the student. But as with processes of
­neoliberalism, there is an inherent contradiction that eases this transition.
Instead of an authority telling you what to do, you are free to discipline
yourself to be flexible, adapt, and learn to learn how to be a good neolib-
eral subject. This is a false liberation as your choices are limited.
All of P21’s Life and Career Skills are reflective of employability require-
ments within post-industrialization. As articulated above, the precarious
working environments of immaterial labor under post-Fordism demand
ongoing learning for continued employability. Moreover, in anticipation
of a precarious work environment, P21 also prioritizes students’ flexibility
and adaptability so that they can work as effectively and creatively as pos-
sible across cultural differences, changing roles, ambiguity, and various
artistic contexts toward innovation. Overall, one could surmise that the
liberation of the student away from an overly controlling art teacher
toward self-governmentality in learning to learn is the ultimate prepara-
tion for the veil of increased autonomy of the artist toward self-precarity
within post-Fordism. Immaterial labor processes require subjects that self-­
govern. Both teachers and students of art education are shaping and con-
stituting good neoliberal subjects that are knowledge self-managers with
52   N.M. KALIN

ample self-direction and flexibility, committed to lifelong learning toward

innovative artistic solutions.

How Now?
This chapter has provided a contextualized explanation of the pressures on
the field of art education in our neoliberal times. P21 fuses art education
with neoliberal governmentality in ways that warrant attention and have
incited me to question how business was able to gain such a foothold in art
education. The labor demands of post-Fordist production processes have
valorized the artist as the ideal worker and rationalized why art education
should exist today—our priorities and efforts have to answer to neoliberal
ideology as creativity education is increasingly considered the solution to
economic problems. The processes of governmentality of the self and oth-
ers have provided one explanation for how we got here as a field of art
education and how we might rethink the pressure points between learning
and government. How these mechanisms work on the mobilization of
creativity education and how art educators might respond will be the focus
of the remainder of this volume, starting in the next chapter with an inves-
tigation of critique’s place within neoliberal governmentality.

Notes
1. Kearney and Harris (2013) point out an interesting contradiction in the
marrying of culture and industry as creative practitioners employ produc-
tion methods aimed at novelty far from the automated production lines
associated with heavy industry (pp.  312–313). But industry also denotes
economic overtones that instrumentalize art and culture away from “con-
tributing to areas such as the collective good and social cohesion” (Kearney
and Harris 2013, p. 313).
2. Post-Fordist economic structures align seamlessly with American econo-
mist, urbanist, and cultural sociologist Richard Florida’s “creative economy”
(2008) as articulated in his books such as The Rise of the Creative Class
(2002). Art education as a source for the creative class has a role to play in
assisting the further development of world-class arts districts within cities
helping nations to compete in the global (neoliberal) economy (see Florida
2005, 2008).
3. The gig economy in relation to artists is a theme explored within blog essays
by Howes (2016), Tepper (2016), and Woronkowicz (2016) that were all
also reprinted within the 2016 report titled Creativity connects: Trends and
   GOVERNMENTALITY AND POST-FORDIST ART EDUCATION    53

conditions affecting U.S. artists by the Center for Cultural Innovation for
National Endowment for the Arts.

References
Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, È. (2005). The new spirit of capitalism (3rd ed.).
(G. Elliott, Trans.). New York: Verso. (Original work published in 1999).
Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Brooklyn:
Zone Books.
Center for Cultural Innovation for National Endowment for the Arts. (2016).
Creativity connects: Trends and conditions affecting U.S. artists. Washington,
DC: National Endowment for the Arts. Retrieved from https://www.arts.
gov/sites/default/files/Creativity-Connects-Final-Report.pdf. Accessed 19
Aug 2017.
De Bruyne, P. (2012). Turbulence in arts paradise some notes on the future of art
schools. In P.  De Bruyne & P.  Gielen (Eds.), Being an artist in post-Fordist
times (2nd ed., pp. 147–156). NAi Publishers: Rotterdam.
De Peuter, G. (2011). Creative economy and labor precarity: A contested conver-
gence. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 35(4), 417–425.
Florida, R. (2002). The rise of the creative class. New York: Basic Books.
Florida, R. (2005). Cities and the creative class. New York: Routledge.
Florida, R. (2008). Who’s your city? How the creative economy is making where to live
the most important decision of your life. New York: Basic Books.
Foucault, M. (2009). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the College De
France 1977–1978 (G.  Burchell, Trans.). New  York: Palgrave Macmillan.
(Original work published in 2004.)
Gielen, P. (2010). The murmuring of the artistic multitude; Global art, memory
and post-Fordism. Amsterdam: Valiz.
Gill, R., & Pratt, A. (2013). Precarity and cultural work in the social factory?
Immaterial labour, precariousness and cultural work. ONCURATING.org,
1(16), 26–40.
Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Harvey, D. (1989). The condition of postmodernity. Maiden: Blackwell.
Howes, S. A. (2016, April 21). Artists, the original gig economy workers, have more
rights than they think. Retrieved from https://www.arts.gov/partnerships/
creativity-connects/report/artists-the-original-gig-economy-workers-more-
rights-than-they-think. Accessed 19 Aug 2017.
Kearney, G., & Harris, P. (2013). Supporting the creative industries: The rationale
for an exchange of thinking between the art and business schools. International
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Lazzarato, M. (1996). Immaterial labor. (P.  Colilli & E.  Emery, Trans.) In
M.  Hardt & P.  Virno (Eds.), Radical thought in Italy: A potential politics
(pp. 133–147). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Léger, M.  J. (2013). For the de-incapacitation of community art practice.
ONCURATING.org, 1(16), 51–57.
Lorey, I. (2006). Governmentality and self-precarization: On the normalization of
cultural producers (L.  Rosenblatt & D.  Fink, Trans.). Transveral. Retrieved
from http://eipcp.net/transversal/1106/lorey/en/print. Accessed 27 July
2017.
Martin, S. (2008). Pedagogy of human capital. Mute, 2(8). Retrieved from http://
www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/pedagogy-human-capital. Accessed 27
July 2017.
McRobbie, A. (2007). The Los Angelisation of London Three short-waves of
young people’s micro-economies of culture and creativity in the UK.
Transversal. Retrieved from http://eipcp.net/transversal/0207/mcrobbie/
en. Accessed 27 July 2017.
McRobbie, A. (2013). “Everyone is creative”: Artists as new economy pioneers?
ONCURATING.org, 1(16), 58–61. (Original work published in 2001).
Ozgun, A. (2011). Creative industries: Neo-liberalism as mass deception. In M. J.
Léger (Ed.), Culture and contestation in the new century (pp.  106–124).
Chicago: Intellect.
Partnership for 21st Century Learning. (2015). Framework for 21st Century
Learning. Washington, DC: Partnership for 21st Century Learning. Retrieved
from http://www.p21.org/storage/documents/P21_framework_0515.pdf.
Accessed 27 July 2017.
Partnership for 21st Century Skills. (n.d.). 21st century skills map. The arts.
Washington, DC: Partnership for 21st Century Learning. Retrieved from
http://www.p21.org/storage/documents/P21_arts_map_final.pdf. Accessed
27 July 2017.
Penzin, A. (2010). The Soviets of the multitude: On collectivity and collective
work. Mediations, 25(1), 81–92.
Pongratz, L. A. (2006). Voluntary self-control: Education reform as a governmen-
tal strategy. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 38(4), 471–482.
Relyea, L. (2013). Your everyday art world. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Simons, M. (2006). Learning as investment: Notes on governmentality and bio-
politics. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 38(4), 523–450.
Simons, M., & Masschelein, J. (2008). The governmentalization of learning and
the assemblage of a learning apparatus. Educational Theory, 58(4), 391–415.
Tepper, S. J. (2016, March 31). What does it mean to sustain a career in the gig
economy? [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.arts.gov/partnerships/
creativity-connects/report/what-does-it-mean-to-sustain-a-career-in-the-gig-
economy. Accessed 19 Aug 2017.
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Virno, P. (2012). The dismeasure of art. An interview with Paolo Virno/

Interviewers S. Lavaert & P. Gielen. In P. Gielen & P. De Bruyne (Eds.), Being
an artist in post-Fordist times (2nd ed., pp. 19–46).
Woronkowicz, J.  (2016, May 12). Do artists have a competitive edge in the gig
economy? [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.arts.gov/partnerships/
creativity-connects/report/do-artists-have-a-competitive-edge-in-the-gig-
economy. Accessed 19 Aug 2017.
 CHAPTER 4

Radical Critique’s Challenge to Art

Education

Abstract  This chapter takes up the notion of critique in relation to cre-

ativity. I delve into the state of criticism in art education at this time play-
ing out in the coercion and contortion of criticality into critical thinking
skills for practical solutions. Employing such mechanisms as pragmatic
blindness, art education aims to maintain present versions of the field safe
from reinvention. Global education reform has come to embrace creative
and critical thinking skills toward innovation—the two skillsets need one
another in order for innovation to thrive. Yet, both creativity and criticality
are morphing into altered forms that actually limit the possible. Radical
critique is proposed as a counter to the pragmatization of criticality, art
education, and society at large.

Keywords  Creativity • Neoliberalism • Critical thinking • Critique •

21st century skills

This chapter asserts that art education is complicit in advancing neoliberal

priorities through its adherence to and stewardship toward an ever-­
narrowing pragmatic version of itself as a field in the service of
­vocationalization1 and creative problem solving. This dilemma of accom-
modating art education to neoliberalism is facilitated through the employ-
ment of such mechanisms as pragmatic blindness in line with a productivist

© The Author(s) 2018 57

N.M. Kalin, The Neoliberalization of Creativity Education,
Creativity, Education and the Arts,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71525-4_4
58   N.M. KALIN

ideology. Such accommodations serve to also lock the field within a status
quo, wherein art education aims to maintain present versions of the field
safe from harm and reinvention. GERM has widely come to embrace both
creative and critical thinking skills toward innovation within policy and
curricular mandates—the two skillsets need one another in order for inno-
vation to thrive. Yet, both creativity and criticality are morphing into
altered forms that actually limit the possible.
I consider the state of criticism in relation to art education at this time
playing out in the coercion and contortion of criticality into critical think-
ing skills for practical solutions. Radical critique is proposed as a counter
to the pragmatization of criticality, art and creativity education, as well as
society at large. For it is through the challenge of radical critique that
structures can undergo disarticulation and become more cognizant of
their current shortsightedness and failings. To begin, I tease out some dif-
ferences between critical thinking and criticality before examining these
phenomena in light of the trend toward increased horizontalism within
society. I round out the chapter with an exploration of the implications
radical critique as a proposal might hold for art education.

Critical Thinking Versus Criticality

This section explores creativity’s value to innovation and points to the
omission of criticality in current working definitions of creativity. I extend
this analysis to examples culled from recent GERM reforms in Asian
nations related to creativity and critical thinking in schooling. Next, I
reflect on these matters in making a distinction between critical thinking
and creativity. Lastly, I bring this all back to how such a distinction
illuminates the challenge of activating criticality to break through
­
pragmatization.
One can interpret Robinson’s (2016) definition of creativity as “the
process of having original ideas that have value” (p. 118) in myriad ways,
especially in regard to how the word ‘value’ is understood. Within neolib-
eralism, value equates to economic worth. When the world of economics
circles the arts and creativity as sources of economic growth, it typically
bypasses completely that the arts and creativity, along with humanities and
culture, facilitate the growth of human beings in understanding humanity
and contributing to society and participatory democracy. This begs the
following questions: Are we nearing a period where the appropriate
   RADICAL CRITIQUE’S CHALLENGE TO ART EDUCATION    59

approach to creativity education is one that facilitates knowledge to serve

power and its economic leanings? Does this come at the expense of knowl-
edge generation that might also critique that authority and its priorities—
the former reproducing and extending hegemony, and the latter enabling
a deeper understanding of prevailing circumstances as well as knowledge
of individual complicity with and/or struggles against the structures of
power?
I am going to extend the definition of creativity a bit further to
inquire into its processes more intently. Creativity comprises imagina-
tion and innovation, with imagination being at the root as “the ability to
bring to mind things that aren’t present to our senses. Creativity is put-
ting your imagination to work. It is applied imagination. Innovation is
putting new ideas into practice” (Robinson 2016, p.  118). As Harris
(2014) reiterates, innovation can be more narrowly conceptualized as
creative capital whose value is only determined by the marketplace. What
is missing here is the component of criticality. Nevertheless, it is crucial
to not overlook that “creativity and innovation (even in centralised edu-
cational contexts) bring with them a degree of social critique” (p. 58) so
as to ensure that the status quo is not reproduced for “[d]issent is inno-
vation” (Harris 2014, p. 22). Alas, “today’s creativity is only acceptable
if it has limited newness, and very limited to no negativity” (Harris
2014, p. 114) (italics from original). This poses a quandary for art and
creativity education today that needs to be foregrounded in our ongoing
efforts.
Criticality encompasses reflective consideration, skepticism, open-­
mindedness, truth-seeking, and judiciousness (see Dewey 1910) that
mutually depend on, interact with, and are reciprocally influenced by cre-
ativity. As Paul and Elder (2008) claim, criticality and creativity cannot be
separated without muting each other. Moreover, Robinson (2016) warns,
compliance in education related to innovation is suffocating as the capaci-
ties of creativity, imagination, and dissent would be discouraged or even
resented (p.  36). Emphasis on testing and overly prescribed curriculum
“comes at the expense of teaching children how to employ their natural
creativity and entrepreneurial talents—the precise talents that might insu-
late them against the unpredictability of the future in all parts of the
world” (Robinson 2016, p. 162).
According to Pemberton and Nix’s (2012) summary of GERM located
within educational policies in countries such as Japan and the United
60   N.M. KALIN

Kingdom, there are three conflicting concepts of criticality encompassing

the following:

• a liberal arts emphasis on the role of critical thinking in the rounded

intellectual growth of the individual;
• a civic-minded association of criticality with active and informed par-
ticipation in democratic citizenship; and
• a more instrumental focus on critical thinking skills as one of a range
of capacities demanded of the workforce by the rapidly changing
information-based economy of the early 21st century. (p. 80)

In my survey of international GERM documents, criticality today is typi-

cally associated with the third option, and critical thinking is most often
coupled with problem solving, as it is in P21 (Partnership for 21st Century
Learning 2015) and the Programme for International Student Assessment
(PISA) exam.2 Critical thinking is similarly defined by the World Economic
Forum (2015) as “the ability to identify, analyse and evaluate situations,
ideas and information in order to formulate responses to problems”
(p.  3)—critical thinking is for the solving of problems exclusively. The
implications are that there is little to no value in pointing out, protesting,
ruminating on, or creating problems if they are not solvable or beyond our
control. These sorts of limitations are generally welcomed for particular
countries grappling with GERM and late capitalism.
Foreseeing the economic need for critical thinking and creativity well in
advance of many nations, China has beefed up its integration of creativity
and critical thinking since reforms in educational policy commenced in
2001, representing concerted effort to enhance students’ abilities to inno-
vate in future employment. This is evidence of a broad cultural shift toward
ending severe restrictions to the practices of creativity and critical thinking
under the Cultural Revolution. As a result, “teachers are becoming more
innovative in their instructional strategies, but they are not necessarily
using those new strategies to increase student creativity” (Pang and
Plucker 2013, p. 269). China is not alone in its desire to embrace a limited
version of creativity and critical thinking.
Even though Singapore society still has constraints on freedom of
speech and broadly endorses deference to authority, this is not stopping an
overall embrace of experimentation, critical thinking, and innovation in
learning while enhancing social and emotional competencies. Elsewhere,
in South Korea two criteria added under Education for Creativity within
   RADICAL CRITIQUE’S CHALLENGE TO ART EDUCATION    61

curriculum reforms started in 2008–09 are independence and openness.3

Despite these and many other efforts, Koh et al. (2012) assert that exam-­
driven and teacher-centered assessment culture inhibits creative and criti-
cal thinking from surfacing in Asian societies such as Singapore, China,
Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan.4 A case in point is that strong PISA
results in countries like Singapore and South Korea do not correlate with
critical thinking skills.
Increasingly there has been the realization that in many nations beyond
Asia

a gap exists between foundational literacies and competencies and character

qualities such as critical thinking, creativity and curiosity. For example,
Poland performs well on a range of indicators representing foundational
literacies, even while displaying gaps in critical thinking/problem-solving
and curiosity. Similarly, Ireland stands out in terms of foundational skill indi-
cators relative to other OECD countries, but shows gaps when compared to
peers on critical thinking/problem-solving, creativity and curiosity. (World
Economic Forum 2015, p. 7)

As author Yong Zhao shares in an interview with Rubin (2014), China, as

“a perfect incarnation of authoritarian education, has produced the world’s
best test scores at the cost of diverse, creative, and innovative talents”
(n.p.). Singapore’s recent embrace of the challenging of convention in the
name of entrepreneurship education runs alongside regulations limiting
freedom of speech and societal norms that cherish stability and order
(Reuters 2017; Tan and Gopinathan 2000).
Alas, one cannot assume that the support of innovation and decentral-
ized curriculum automatically encourages dissent, especially in countries
like China and those in Southeast Asia with an ongoing history of authori-
tarian government. The reverse of this is the consequences of educational
authoritarianism in more liberal western contexts such as the United
States, which may enjoy a reputation for freedom but are devoted to stan-
dardized testing and homogenized curricula.5 Countries like South Korea
with their high student suicide rates and China’s recent history of educa-
tional authoritarianism should stand as warnings of what may happen to
innovation and creativity when testing takes over.
Criticality may help societies thrive, not solely in economic ways.
Schooling needs to be aware that the cultivation of criticality and creativity
furthers democratic practices, values, and participation. In societies lack-
ing tolerance for dissent, creativity and critical thinking may be difficult to
62   N.M. KALIN

foster. Criticality also contributes to the flourishing of democratic societies

through encouraging judgment in the distinction between fact and opin-
ion, fake and actual, honesty and deception, all of which seem to be in dire
supply at this moment, exacerbated by the perpetual bombardment of
information (Robinson 2016) and ongoing accusations of fake news and
alternative facts in the United States.
Dissenting from common sense and challenging the authority of the
status quo is inherent in critical thinking and criticality whether in politics,
business, or technology. Nonconformity is required for creativity (Torrance
2002), and hierarchical relationships even within school settings tend to
curb creativity (Kim 2005). How would this work in creativity education
within schooling, where teacher/student and teacher/administrator rela-
tionships are inherently unequal? And how is teachers’ flexible and respon-
sive creativity curbed in the rigidity of standards-based teaching? “If the
impressionable minds of the students have as an example a teacher who is
restricted from creativity or from discovering the creativity within them,
how can students ever be free to learn and display a sense of originality or
creativity within themselves?” (Kim 2005, p. 341). Further, if schooling is
primarily a system of control, governmentality, and compliance to author-
ity, where do creativity and the invitation to create society anew occur? Or
is that not the motive of a business bias6 in creativity? Has creativity been
domesticated in the manifestations of schooling toward docility for citi-
zenry? The submission of creativity to market forces sounds a clarion call
for me as an art educator to embrace the lack of control and obedience7
that art might birth at any moment or place.
Art education as a field has a history of including art criticism as a dis-
cipline in its curricular mandate, most often apparent in class crits of stu-
dent art work, in the evaluation of artists’ works, and less often in art
making that embraces social critique. However, creativity is not the only
aspect of art education that finds itself under constriction, as the next sec-
tion of this chapter articulates.

Crisis of Criticism
Due to the democratization of knowledge and culture under neoliberal-
ism over the past decades, criticism, like creativity, has been experiencing
devaluation and crisis (Berger 1998; Chiapello 2004; Elkins 2003; Elkins
and Newman 2008; Lijster 2013; McDonald 2007; Rubinstein 2006) as
it disperses through the rise of horizontalism and amateurism, which have
   RADICAL CRITIQUE’S CHALLENGE TO ART EDUCATION    63

trivialized and diminished its role. The trend toward increased horizontal-
ism within society belittles and bypasses experts with cultural capital in
favor of DIY, networked, flexible, adaptable, and user-friendly forms of
cultural and knowledge production. Likewise, in the knowledge economy,
where knowledge is considered a commodity that can be more readily
accessed than ever before through the Internet, cultural and educational
institutions are less and less valued for their verticality and expertise.8
Art criticism has not proven immune to this quandary, inspiring Elkins
(2003) to proclaim, “[a]rt criticism is massively produced, and massively
ignored” (p.  4), “[s]o it’s dying, but it’s everywhere” (p.  2). As Lijster
(2013) shares, “with the rise of the mass media, critics lose their tradi-
tional mediating function: in a mass-mediated society, no one can claim to
be ‘better informed’ than anybody else” (p. 39). Further, Lijster (2013)
maintains that while criticism is on a decline within an increasingly flat-
tened world, few bother to mourn this trend as

[m]ore often than not, the critic is considered a relic of a less democratic
age, which we are happy to have gotten rid of. Why do we need critics once
we can decide on our own what we like and do not like? (pp. 36–37)

To a large extent, criticism has expanded to become embedded in our

everyday, everywoman/ man experience of the real world, no longer the
art or other specialized world of elite knowledge alone. In a sense, criti-
cism, like creativity, has been democratized as

a broad form of social labor: rating and recommending objects and experi-
ences has become a mainstay of today’s ubiquitous social media, as well as
an important cost-free source of value-adding for retailers. On the other
hand, individual response to individual objects, the baseline formula for the
work of critics, dwindles in significance, especially as network connectivity
overwhelms the formerly isolating boundaries of sovereign individuals and
discrete artworks. (Relyea 2013, pp. 181–182)

This democratization of critique flattens the labor of the critic into mere
opinion, with no one opinion better than another or any one authority to
assess our efforts.
The point in this milieu is that promoting certain types of horizontal
knowledge flattens the work of art educators, curators, critics, artists, and
other specialists who have devoted their lives to the study, understanding,
and making of art in favor of a do-it-yourself aesthetics. As profundity is
64   N.M. KALIN

flattened and spread into breadth within the paradigm of horizontalism in

once vertical cultural and educational institutions such as museums and art
schools, cumulative knowledge is not as valued as flexibility in response to
changing market conditions and on-the-spot problem solving (Deresiewicz
2015; McRobbie 2001/2013).
In this way, the watering down of criticality into critical thinking skills
across GERM policy documents stands as a pertinent example. Increasingly,
critical thinking skills are being integrated into national curricular man-
dates. In the US-based P21, for instance, it is recommended that “[s]
pecific courses in critical thinking should be made available to all students”
(Dilley et al. n.d., p. 7). The implication is that critical thinking skills on
their own, unattached from the depth of disciplinary knowledge, will serve
our students just fine in future post-Fordist labor.
Verticality of knowledge loses some of its function and relevance when
measured against the dominant value and rigidity of pragmatism toward
economic goals. Under these circumstances, criticism seems remote and
immobile, lacking relevance and responsiveness, standing out as a mode of
disengagement surrounded by modes of efficient productivity. In short, the
authority of educators as professionals/intellectuals, like critics and cura-
tors, is diffused, outsourced, and under attack. Expertise, whatever is left of
it, must adapt; the critic becomes the critical thinker and problem solver.
Furthermore, personal narratives of experience, interpretation, trans-
formation, judgment, and reflexivity in relation to culture are embraced in
heroic defiance against highly regimented or inaccessible disciplinary,
canonical, institutional, and/or theoretical knowledge. The personal is
primary, making criticism more porous, fragmented, and relativistic, as
well as less alienating than hierarchical knowledge. Along these lines,
Wright (2008) claims, expert culture has been challenged by the user,
player, maker, and do-it-yourselfer9 to prioritize use-value and user-­
determined meaning over elitist knowledge.10

Productivist Ideology
Interestingly, challenges to underlying tenets of art education might pro-
vide instances of the very critical and creative thinking that the dominant
systems of neoliberalism, post-Fordism, and cultural industries require.11
There are a couple of sides to this claim. Critical thinking has been under
considerable attack (for an example, see Weil 2012). An irony likely not
lost on readers of this volume is that the very capacities needed to contest
   RADICAL CRITIQUE’S CHALLENGE TO ART EDUCATION    65

or limit the reach of neoliberal economization—such as critical creativ-

ity—are the skills that have been co-opted to accelerate economization
through vocationalization of art education in mandates associated with
GERM. To return to an example of this development, P21 gives promi-
nence to critical thinking as one of its grounding 4Cs (Partnership for 21st
Century Skills n.d.).
At face value, critical thinking is highly valued, at least in the context of
the 4Cs. However, critique for critique’s sake is not held in such a favor-
able light as critical and creative problem solving toward productivist ends.
To my reading, critical thinking (defined in the 4Cs of P21 as “[t]he pro-
cess of analyzing, synthesizing, conceptualizing, applying, and/or evaluat-
ing information from various sources” [Dilley et al. n.d., p. 11]) reduces
its end goal to problem solving such as critical thinking toward the solu-
tion of design problems or better designed goods and services to meet
consumer/client needs. Indeed, more often than not, creativity in a neo-
liberal world is “equated with ‘problem-solving’, which is something else
entirely than causing problems or, rather, problematizing issues, a task
that was until recently reserved for the artist or dabbler” (Gielen 2013,
p. 38). Lest we forget, as Gielen (2013) points out, true

creativity can only originate from a critical distance. The type of creation
that we have been calling ‘art’ since the modern age depends to a large
degree on the possibility of taking a critical stance in one’s own society and
culture. (p. 72)

Art for vocationalized education, much like creativity for industry, “must
not be dangerous, threatening, critical or negative of cultural ethics, or—
when it is—must be neutralized quickly to harvest its maximum market
potential” (Harris 2014, p. 114). When measured against a productivist
ideology (Baldacchino 2013)—which legitimates “a business-facing and
enterprise-oriented system of [art] education” (p. 350)—critique is ren-
dered impractical and unproductive.
Art education scholarship stealthily focused on productivist aims that,
while providing deliverables related to research findings and best practices,
can also effectively defang critical modes of scholarship of their sting.
Harris (2014) claims that as the creative industries dominating western
global economies demand increased productivity through the embrace of
creativity and innovation, social critique comes along for the ride (p. 58).
For Harris (2014), even under a productivist paradigm, creativity and
66   N.M. KALIN

innovation always go hand in hand with critique. However, this aspect can
be denied, hidden, subdued, or silenced as mere negativity, quite irrele-
vant to the momentum required for generating problem solutions. After
all, art educators are not problem creators; they are ingenious art advo-
cates and problem solvers, especially in schooling environments that have
undermined the stature of the arts over recent decades.
A focus on the productivist seems to only intensify dominant modes
such as neoliberalism. Without any counter-hegemonic discourse, we risk
further depoliticizing our work as art and creativity educators and severely
limiting our future imaginaries. Fortunately, critique may still offer many
modes that art educators, their students, and others might reconsider as
productive under alternative metrics.

Radical Critique as Productive Practice

I wish to push criticality, with its above-stated limitations, even further. In
order to do so, I invoke radical critique as a form of negation and refusal
against consensus that questions a system of knowledge through making
visible and giving voice to what a ruling consensus or discipline fights to
keep hidden and quiet (Rancière 2004). This can take many forms such as
institutional critique, art criticism, or critical art, as well as social and/or
theoretical criticism. In particular, resistive and radical critique seeks out
the stable and naturalized in order to hold the mirror up to what we have
become without necessarily rushing to offer productive solutions to our
present circumstances, as in the coupling of critical thinking with problem
solving. This antagonism toward common sense aims to “arouse discon-
tent with the current state of things” (Mouffe 2013, p. 95) through pro-
cesses of disarticulating prevailing frameworks and their functioning.
In this way, a lack of obedience to dominant boundaries and the resist-
ing of consensus can be considered irrelevant and useless when compared
to work that provides strategies for resolution within existing structures or
so-called solutions to current societal problems. Instead, Lorey (2008)
views these dissensual facets of critique “as a productive practice” in their
own right. Moreover, BAVO (2007) maintains, “the critic should expose
the demand to propose concrete alternatives as illegitimate, unfair and
ultimately a sign of the ruling order’s own impotence” (p. 21). This holds
numerous implications for the ruling order of art education’s impotence
and perceived power within wider socio-economic arrangements and
ideologies.
   RADICAL CRITIQUE’S CHALLENGE TO ART EDUCATION    67

Radical critique can get at root issues such as the ideological structures
of our practices and priorities while disclosing the depoliticized mecha-
nisms of what we do and why. What sets radical critique apart from other
forms of criticism is the commitment to go deep while withdrawing one-
self from a predominant rationality. The word radical comes from the
Latin word radix, referring to the word ‘root,’ so radical critique is about
examining the deep roots of a phenomenon. Instead of simply pruning the
tree, the radical gardener digs deep to get at where the source of the prob-
lem lies.
In a flattened world, digging deep, often in isolation, in a slow and
vertical manner, may seem in light of today’s demands to amount to the
least useful effort a scholar, educator, artist, creative, or student may
undertake as the processes and results are not readily transferable into
classroom interventions or solutions—the deliverables may not yield in a
timely manner or ever. Additionally, critical analyses can tend to come off
as bombastic or be “quickly dismissed as grotesque blow-ups or extrava-
gant exaggerations” in a flat world “where any form of critical creativity,
upright standing or verticality causes irritation” (Relyea 2013, p. 53). As
Relyea (2013) further maintains, critique “within the current neophilia” is
more often than not “shoved aside as ‘obsolete’, ‘has-been’ or even ‘reac-
tionary’” (p. 53).12
Radical critique as a counter to productivism emerges from close study
using alternative framings and language, so that we might breach existing
modes and turn against ourselves in order to think and do differently (St.
Pierre 2012). By its very nature, radical critique presents itself as a dis-
agreement to the wave of DIY, amateurism “required by the constant
just-in-time turmoil of our networked world” (Relyea 2013, p.  5).
Whereas punk subcultures are typically involved in anti-authoritarian and
anti-establishment beliefs, radical critique is absolutely not to be confused
with the ‘new punk’ of DIYism that endlessly bargains and negotiates with
a current system’s values, laws, and norms—these efforts are

constructed in conformity with dominant conditions by being flexible rather

than rigidly disciplined, and by acting out in … daily material practices the
society’s reigning belief in flexibility, flux, and the short-term as undeniably
enduring and timeless values. (Relyea 2013, p. 49)

The ironically timeless values of the do-it-yourselfer focus on practice as

the utmost imperative, perhaps apart from economic motives.
68   N.M. KALIN

What to Do? Pragmatic Blinding of Art Education

Giroux (2013) identifies the increasing encroachment of technocratic
approaches to teacher preparation and teaching pedagogy that embrace
instrumental and corporate ideologies as one of the major threats to teach-
ers today (p. 461). While we are enduring art education under this threat,
we have to push against just accepting this advance and falling in line with
this regime, valorizing the pragmatic and practical in meeting the instru-
mental appetite of the technocratic at the expense of the devaluation of
critical, theoretical, and intellectual work within the professions associated
with art education and education writ large. Giroux (2013) goes so far as
to claim that the emphasis on practical and the pragmatic solutions to the
technocratic demands embrace a pedagogy that infantilizes educators and
deskills teaching, while de-intellectualizing the discipline of education into
instrumental rationality alone.13
Certainly, as some might respond, art educators have enough to deal
with without increased contradiction, insecurity, and irresolution brought
about through critical perspectives that offer few, if any, resolutions to the
issues such perspectives bring to the surface. In these times, it is under-
standable that we need to feel like we are making some progress toward
change, improvement, and empowerment within the current system. We
hold firm to these beliefs, as they are central to the undertaking of educa-
tion itself; to learn is to change. Therefore, it is quite possible to think one
can bracket art education practice apart from any sort of theoretical, social,
political, or economic perspectives that might problematize claims to
progress.
The question often demanded of radical critique is: What would you do
instead? This demand restrains critique to a pragmatic politics—solutions
instead of deep thought on the actual problems. The apparent inference is
that it is easy to criticize, that it is somehow cowardly, ill tempered,
uncivil,14 and impotent in the face of getting on with the responsibilities of
innovating and implementing solutions to problems. Another insinuation
is that we can’t change the problems and are just fools to waste time think-
ing on the problems themselves instead of on how best to live with them—
radical critique is superfluous and just noise when we should be getting
back to business as usual. In this view, criticism isn’t considered a demo-
cratic duty or ethical responsibility of public intellectuals, but a trouble-
some irritant that needs to be disregarded or at least boiled down into
clear steps toward concrete application. BAVO (2007) claims this mandate
   RADICAL CRITIQUE’S CHALLENGE TO ART EDUCATION    69

is paramount to the blackmail of critique holding the critique’s opposition

hostage until it can produce its own resolution. It also plays out as the only
criterion for the value of critique—does it offer concrete solutions? If not,
it is deemed a useless annoyance (or reminder of what we are enduring),
opaque, dense, hyperbolic, vague, or worse, the author is called a ‘hater’
to be brushed off even in today’s academy. Moreover, while critique is
obliged to dance with power—there is a dependency on power, ideology,
and hubris—it is also the only force to pierce power’s vulnerability, over
and over again.
Conversely, a dedication to operable solutions accelerates a pragmatic
blinding—“the censoring of a certain conceptualization of reality based
on its alleged unproductivity for practice” (BAVO 2007, p. 27). If criti-
cism cannot come up with solutions, marketable innovations, best prac-
tices, empirical findings, or examples of how things should be, the critique
is de-legitimized under the standard of pragmatic applicability. This places
in dire jeopardy critical analysis as a worthy supplement and open-ended
activity to transgress and propose unanswered questions.
The failure of criticism and the rise of pragmatism in this time aligns
with and reflect current social and organizational norms under neoliberal-
ism. Relyea (2013) maintains that since the 1980s, society has increasingly
fetishized practice at the price of devaluing theory and criticism.
Furthermore, BAVO (2007) asserts the demand that criticism morphs
into concrete alternatives, all but neutralizes criticism, affirming the
authority of the status quo. For it is the very nature of criticism to attempt
to take an autonomous stand outside of a structure or a disciplinary
domain such as art education, in order to unveil and put into question that
which it is commenting on. This holds little value in comparison to work
that offers solutions to issues/failures, links to new ways of doing across
disciplines and contexts, while circulating freely through clear and under-
standable language along networks of meaning. In this way, criticism, if it
is even allowed to be shared on a platform, can stop dead in its tracks.
Radical criticism calls attention to unresolved or unresolvable issues
while questioning values and pointing to what may be deemed un-­valuable.
While the urge to privilege practice in applied disciplines like education
can be tremendous, the warping and reduction of critique to practical
concerns through the demand for examples of best practices focuses our
attention on the performative, while diverting our energies from the social
and structural spaces of our work, thereby reducing the complexity of our
collective struggles and squeezing out the unresolvable as an area worthy
70   N.M. KALIN

of contemplation. Ironically, once specified, qualified, and applied, radical

critique loses much of its potency. For instance, this makes scholarship that
facilitates what educators are already doing or being asked to do under
neoliberal regimes the most appealing.
Moreover, BAVO (2007) maintains that critique itself is being assaulted
and corrupted by the growing domination of “constructive critique,”
which is a form of criticism that amounts to “mere window dressing”
(p.  19) and positive or descriptive feedback alone that can make some-
thing good, even better. Critique is increasingly considered an affront to
“etiquette of collegiality” (Relyea 2013, p. 36). Under such limitations,
we predetermine the use-value of critique as mere flattery and practical
application within an existing stream, resulting in the reinforcement of
present circumstances (illustrating the claim that “critique is losing its
criticism” [Gielen 2013, p 71]). In this way, critique fails if it is deemed
useless to pragmatic art education—art education as a performative under-
taking, not an analytical exercise; it has to have use-value.15 This further
results in the thwarting of resistance’s ability to coalesce and disarticulate
our current pragmatism, thereby effectively strangling change before it
can even be voiced or considered; it effectively self-censors criticism of
current power structures.
Critique that is silenced, subordinated, or diluted through an adher-
ence to the use-value of practical application keeps power and abusive
structures intact. Inadvertently, as BAVO (2007) states,

[i]t is no coincidence that such censorship—which the demand for concrete

counterproposals undoubtedly is—is most often exercised when the critic
hits a central nerve of the system, a fundamental issue that cannot be solved
without a radical change of the existing order. Precisely the latter makes it so
difficult for the critic to respond to this demand, since it asks of him/her the
superhuman task of not only creating, through his/her critical labour, a
mental space where a radically new set of ideological coordinates could be
invented, but also to fill in that space and translate it into practicable policy
for everyday situations. (p. 20)

The non-instrumentality of radical critique needs to be reconsidered as

revolutionary possibility in and of itself.

After all, the existing order demands of its critic everything that it (the exist-
ing order)—with all its means and expertise—fails to do. By exposing the
inappropriateness of this demand, the critic should therefore be able to
   RADICAL CRITIQUE’S CHALLENGE TO ART EDUCATION    71

­ roject his/her alleged impotence back onto the ruling order. The latter,
p
however, is only possible when critical actors stop playing today’s game of
pragmatic post-politics and defend their right to criticize without offering
any alternatives. (BAVO 2007, p. 21)

Proposing Radical Critique to Art Education

In its adherence to pragmatism, much art education scholarship and prac-
tice today “functions as an ideological asset” (Relyea 2013, p. 12) to dom-
inant ideology as it is by and large complicit with neoliberalism instead of
unsympathetic to its mandates. What if art education embraces radical
critique as a proposal—not a solution, but a thought that leaves interpre-
tation open without resolution?
In the pressure to reduce the labors of art and creativity education to
the pragmatics of critical thinking without radical critique, we risk denying
the politics of our field and its associated endeavors, which “leads to an
excessive focus on the ‘what’—i.e. on what can be done, how it is to be
done, etc.—that overshadows the ‘that’—i.e. outrage over the fact that
there is something fundamentally wrong, the political causes, etc.” (BAVO
2007, p. 27). We act as if we don’t really have the power to change any-
thing, so ‘let’s just keep busy sharing ways to get through this or to better
fill the cracks in a broken system.’ The only engagement with the status
quo is convivial, dialogical, collaborative, and horizontal in nature. ‘Let’s
pull up our bootstraps and make the best of this.’ This busywork helps us
avoid the frustration of thinking about the existing order as otherwise. We
control what we can in the specific context we are in, instead of aiming to
change that which we believe we can’t, beyond the micro. In this, we act
as the fail-safe mechanism to keep not only art education, but also by
extension structures of power such as schooling and government within
the broader society as they currently are. In this way, radical critique is an
extremely important aspect of a thriving and evolving participatory
democracy. Without sustained practice in radical critique within a disci-
pline such as art, where and/or how are these ‘skills’ being advanced?
This mindset not only limits possible conceptions of the field of art
education, but also suppresses what art educators are willing to support
in their students’ art making in regard to criticality and creativity. Key
questions art educators might ask of themselves include: What forms of
criticality do I permit in my teaching? How does this align or misalign
with my facilitation of creativity? Is critical thinking toward valuable
72   N.M. KALIN

solutions the only valid form of criticality in my art education curricu-

lum? What am I protecting by excluding radical critique in my art class-
room? What am I risking by excluding explorations of radical critique
through art?

Radical Examples
As indicated above, diverse forms of radical critique are omitted when art
education practices and scholarship are boiled down to critical thinking
toward solutions and ‘what works’ alone. Radical critique in forms of
interventions, pedagogy, inquiry, and/or scholarship offers a dissensual
polemic against status quo thinking that goes beyond a mere pragmatic
adjustment of art education. If permitted airing, these forms may render
inoperative otherwise operative mechanisms, discourses, and practices
associated with the field and society. Moreover, radical critique may also
offer a cognitive map of deeper relationships between art educational
trends and economic and/or political forces. Lastly, radical critique may
use characteristics of art education against itself. In the instance of the
“reign of the example” described as a pragmatic blinding above, radical
critique may employ the notion of the example toward not so pragmatic
ends. In what follows, I delve into this one potential of radical critique in
a little more depth.
Examples can be found in radical critique, but they act as wrenches in
the machine that, unlike pragmatic examples, do not grease the wheels of
the status quo. One might say these examples are radical in that they aim
to undo and problematize the pragmatic, commonsense logic of a particu-
lar ideology. The former gestures beyond the given and challenges the
status quo, while the latter merely reinforces what is at the expense of what
could or ought to be. In order to escape determination as set out by cur-
rent parameters of art education, radical critique has to step back to gain
alternative perspectives. As BAVO (2007) articulates, “[r]adical critique
challenges the very standard which measures productivity” (p.  20).
Authors such as Paolo Virno (2011) and Lane Relyea (2013) embrace the
joke as a parallel to radical examples. Accordingly, Relyea (2013) states
that

[b]y making fun of reality, at least some distance is created from the events
while naming the errors in that reality. The joke demonstrates the variability
of reality and thereby its relativity. That is to say: in the joke, reality is
   RADICAL CRITIQUE’S CHALLENGE TO ART EDUCATION    73

understood as just one possible reality beside many others, offering a brief
escape from the rule of measure, even if only mentally. But then this mental
­possibility of an exodus, of being above the rule, of looking at oneself in
relation to the rule, is the primary condition for creativity. (p. 89)

Moreover, radical critique that doesn’t play by the pre-set rules of a

phenomenon may generate dismeasures (Virno 2012) in response to an
art education as consensus that aims to efficiently measure the outcomes
of pre-set standards. Radical critique puts forth insights or examples that
are “outside of the measurable measure” (Relyea 2013, p.  27). These
undertakings can remind us that our field is contingent—otherwise it
would be considered a discipline with dogmatic borders. It is this principle
of contingency that “makes it necessary to argue that other visions, opin-
ions and interpretations are always possible. … that there is always another
way of looking at things” (Gielen 2011, p. 8).
Certainly, criticism engenders debate, inspires dissent, and struggles for
legitimization, while those that play within the current rules do not have
to rationalize their footing to the same extent. As the opportunities for
critique shrink, radical examples, especially in such a climate, may act as a
line of transgression to the current order. Without this form of scholarly,
educational, and/or art/creative activism, it is far more difficult to even
imagine our circumstances being otherwise.

Radical Possibility
I feel it is our professional responsibility to be open to the field of art edu-
cation and its associated curricula being otherwise at any moment, even as
“[s]paces for critical autonomy tend to be squeezed out and critical capaci-
ties atrophy, leaving conformity and resignation as the paths of least resis-
tance” (Ray 2011, p. 169). The conditions of radical critique, like artistic
autonomy, are “increasingly improbable as critical capacity is systematically
attacked, undermined, blocked and repressed. Unlikely but still possible”
(Ray 2011, p.  174). Art education is not monolithic and therefore
shouldn’t resign itself to its own conformity against radical critique that
animates art education as a field of struggle. There are tensioned fissures
within the field worth exploring, not only to problem solve, but to also
antagonize, generate more problems, and irritate. Part of our stewardship
of the field is leaving a space for resistance and what is yet to be understood
to arise. Insights that are sobering, alarmist, paralyzing, or threatening can
74   N.M. KALIN

also indicate what might be done, how we might reinvent ourselves, get us
pondering how things might be otherwise, or incite mobilization toward
collective change.
A dispute charged against what one holds dear can be ignored,
accepted, mocked, resented, feared, and/or it can throw the receiver
into a space of not knowing and uncertainty. It is likely that we have all
been there when we felt particular emotions during a confrontation over
our values, and we’ve likely also been in the position of the confronter
of another person’s values. This happens in teaching all the time, if we
listen for it. Radically critical approaches to art education may, for exam-
ple, put on pause and turn on its head our instrumentalist, vocationalist
orientation so that we might see our field differently, perhaps even more
contingently in relation to bodies, objects, time, and contexts. This goes
against a neoliberal efficiency model of realism and instrumentalization
of all spheres of life toward cost-effectiveness—under an ideology of
realism, whatever can’t be measured is deemed unrealistic and wasteful.
As Gielen (2013) warns, “[t]he urgent call for an awareness of reality
obliterates the breathing space for an awareness of what is possible”
(p. 44).
What might be at the basis of a fear and distrust of radical critique? Is it
its supposed uselessness, elitism, or cynicism alone that inspires the field to
hold fast to a pre-established, common sense, measurable, apolitical, and
practical, so synonymous with the ‘realism cult’ associated with neoliberal-
ism? Without radical critique, how else do we get distance from our own
egos, ideologies, or hypocrisies? In our quest for a pragmatics of art and
creativity education scholarship and practice, are we not inadvertently per-
petuating the status quo?
As Harris (2014) bluntly states,

[i]f education-like art is simply a function of reproduction for the state

(think Nazi art, Stalinist schools), they both cease to either critique or
extend current institutional and economic frameworks. In totalitarian
regimes this is desirable, as maintenance of the status quo against the popu-
lar will is a necessary component of control and governmentality. In democ-
racies, and certainly in capitalist growth economies, it is a sign of certain
death. (p. 58)

Pragmatism needs to be balanced with radical criticality. In order to better

understand the forces and contexts bearing down on it, the field needs to
   RADICAL CRITIQUE’S CHALLENGE TO ART EDUCATION    75

continually grow its critical capacity. I maintain that art education cannot
be an intellectual field if it does not stand back and resist the seductive
rush to pragmatism alone. Our collective critical consciousness risks
impoverishment. While it may be unpalatable, we need to continually have
essentialist versions of our field broken in order to at least enrich our per-
spectives and possibly broaden our futures and the futures of those along
with us on the journey.

Terminus
I started this chapter by probing into how criticality is narrowing into
critical thinking within GERM creativity education mandates toward
innovation. This was contextualized within the broader trend to the hori-
zontalization of knowledge and society that has instigated a crisis in criti-
cism. The resulting pragmatic blindness within education was countered
by the proposal of radical critique for art education as a field and
practice.
BAVO (2007) maintains that criticism is an affront to “the subject’s
reflex to make excuses for the current order and to invent ways to ‘manage
it better’ so as to overcome or at least smooth over the problems” (p. 32).
This brings up the question: Have we become a field of “pragmatic ideal-
ists” (BAVO 2007, p. 28) consumed as the hamster with the wheel on
tirelessly going around and around propping up the flawed existing sys-
tem of art education? What if there was more room to consider radical
subversions of the suffocating present field? Is pragmatic engagement and
innovative solution creation the only condition for involvement? Do
desires for extreme change need to be squelched and swallowed, damned
and contorted to the pragmatic? In covering our ears to radical criticism
of the current state of affairs in art education through loyalty to the status
quo coupled with a loyalty to the status quo within the structures we
maintain in our art classrooms, we risk repressing how unjust and intoler-
able the current ideology we are laboring within actually is. In effect,
through the dismissal of radical critique, we act as the fail-safe mechanism
keeping our prevailing version of art education itself from harm, trans-
gression, or reinvention. If we settle that radical, large-scale transforma-
tion is a utopian impossibility, then we limit our focus on specific contexts
and solutions, which perpetuates and speeds up the continuation of what
already exists.
76   N.M. KALIN

Notes
1. As political scientist Wendy Brown (2013) states,
The most important thing that we can do is be good teachers. By that,
… I mean teach students to think well. Whatever we are teaching, …
we need to be teaching them how to read carefully, think hard, ask
deep questions, make good arguments. And the reason this is so
important is that the most substantive casualties of neoliberalism
today are deep, independent thought, the making of citizens, and
liberal arts education as opposed to vocational and technical training.
We faculty still have our classrooms as places to do what we think is
valuable in those classrooms, which for me is not about preaching a
political line, but teaching students that thinking is fundamental to
being human and is increasingly devalued except as a technical prac-
tice. This is an old claim, from the Frankfurt School, but it’s on ste-
roids now. So I believe our most important work as academics is
teaching students to think deeply and well. (n.p.)
2. Carried out by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD), PISA assesses 15-year-old students worldwide on
their scholastic performance in math, science, and reading. Seventy-two
countries partook in the 2015 assessment. Additional results on well-being,
financial literacy, and collaborative problem solving are to be released in 2017.
3. Please visit the South Korean education ministry website for more details:
www.crezone.net.
4. Japan’s National Commission on Education Reform, established in 2000,
focuses on “fundamental issues in education with the aim to encourage
student creativity in the 21st century. Its proposal included the revision of
the Fundamental Law on Education and comprehensive education policy
planning” (OECD 2012, p.  186) in order to demand higher student
achievement and enhanced capacity for innovation and creativity.
5. It is important to note that creativity has been considered under crisis in
the United States as indicated through creativity scores on standardized
tests dropping since the 1990s (Bronson and Merryman 2010).
6. I explore the art versus business bias related to creativity education in the
article “We’re all creatives now: Democratized creativity and education” in
the Journal of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies.
7. In this realization, I join other art educators, such as Dennis Atkinson
(2017), who advocate for art’s disobedience in education and society.
8. Perhaps ironically, the importance of pursing knowledge for its own sake
within the knowledge economy is almost irrational under the view that
knowledge is only valued in meeting specific ends, such as predetermined
competencies toward jobs.
   RADICAL CRITIQUE’S CHALLENGE TO ART EDUCATION    77

9. This is otherwise known as the “heroic neoliberal figure, the DIY free
agent” (Relyea 2013, p.  45) whose “steely sense of role and identity
enforced by former institutional and disciplinary apparatuses of the Fordist
‘society of discipline’ are superseded by the improvised adaptations and
temporary projects of free agents” (pp. 50–51).
10. As Florida Senator Marco Rubio recently opined during a Republican pres-
idential debate, the higher education system is outdated, expensive, “too
hard to access, and it doesn’t teach 21st-century skills” (cited in Stratford
2015, para. 1). Further, presidential candidate Rubio lamented that liberal
arts education was too focused on low-paying fields such as philosophy
while underemphasizing vocational training for jobs that could result in
students receiving higher pay such as those available in the vocation of
welding. This last comparison was resoundingly rejected by data on job
placements and salary trends at the national level (Stratford 2015).
11. Appropriating vocabulary once associated with the arts and subsuming
certain terms—such as creativity and critical thinking—for economic pur-
poses is common under neoliberalism (see Brown 2015).
12. This brings to mind the common refrain “ignore the critics.”
13. This is paramount to the Texas Republican Party’s recent (albeit failed)
attempts to “build into its platform the banning of critical thinking” (Weil
2012, p. 462) within public school education.
14. For further insights on this, read Flaherty’s (2014) post on University of
California, Berkeley Chancellor’s remarks concerning civility and free
speech that angered faculty members.
15. Art within social practice has posed similar questions (see Wright 2008).

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Paul, R., & Elder, L. (2008). The nature and functions of critical & creative think-
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Rancière, J.  (2004). Disagreement: Politics and philosophy (J.  Rose, Trans.).
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ray, G. (2011). Culture industry and the administration of terror. In G. Raunig,
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 CHAPTER 5

Civic Literacy and Art Education: Resisting

an Interpassive Civics Through Art’s
Dismeasure

Abstract  This chapter contemplates the police order of neoliberalism and

its impact on democratic imaginaries of creativity education. The writings
of Jacques Rancière are used to grasp the frictions and potentialities
between neoliberal forms of schooling and democratic pedagogies in art
education. Throughout, I ruminate on the following question: What if art
education could be reconceived as a site of experimentation with demo-
cratic political engagement so that civic learning might create and trans-
form subjectivities? In this endeavor, I examine the interdisciplinary theme
of civic literacy from within the Partnership for 21st Century Skills’ Map
for the Arts in order to ponder the bringing together of creativity and citi-
zenship education as a site of potential emancipation.

Keywords  Creativity • Neoliberalism • Civics • Rancière • Democracy

• 21st century skills

The previous chapter introduced the idea of dismeasure as an indicator of

possibilities related to fundamental critique that would otherwise remain
hidden by measures generated from within the assumptions of the prevail-
ing order. Now, in this chapter, I apply dismeasure to a specific context,
teaching, the cultivation of students’ capacities to apply dismeasure as a
critical intellectual perspective, ingrained by approaches to education that

© The Author(s) 2018 81

N.M. Kalin, The Neoliberalization of Creativity Education,
Creativity, Education and the Arts,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71525-4_5
82   N.M. KALIN

prioritize civic engagement. The mode of civic engagement envisioned in

this chapter sets itself against tinkering with solutions to problems, but
instead is rooted in a genuinely critical perspective, building off of what
was defined in the previous chapter.
At this stage, I wish to emphasize that I am drawing some of the persis-
tent threads in this volume together. This chapter presents a base concep-
tion of a “democratic imaginary for art education” through fostering civic
engagement, which I conceive as capacities to apply dismeasure and cri-
tique in order to mobilize dissensus. My vision of this mode of education
is informed by a consideration of subjectification and a conception of par-
ticipatory democracy that provokes new possibilities of citizenship.
Moreover, this chapter draws closer to articulating my thoughts about
doing art education relative to the overarching problems of neoliberalism,
creativity, and education. I examine P21 closely in this context as an exam-
ple of one way to pull these themes together in a specific art education
context that directly addresses the issues of neoliberal imperatives in art
education.

Neoliberal Citizenship
The neoliberal economic model is a global ideology so ubiquitous that
business values could be considered our new common sense. Since the
1980s, neoliberal governance has dismantled many of the political values
synonymous with twentieth-century liberal democracies, leading Brown
(2015) to deduce that “[d]emocracy itself, always partially and imperfectly
realized, is on the ropes” (p. 19). Moreover, this neoliberal economization
of the political economizes all conduct, drives, and activities into eco-
nomic spheres effectively usurping homo politicus by homo economicus
(Brown 2015).
Neoliberal society reduces the individual responsibilities of citizens
within liberal, representative democracies down to elections that bypass
other nourishing duties such as deliberation and the regulation of power
through various mechanisms. Gielen (2011) points out that “[i]n liberal
representative democracy only the numbers count. All voters can vote
without ever having to defend their vote in public” (p. 10) through pub-
licly voiced and substantiated arguments.
As neoliberalism debilitates democratic practices and cultures that do
not extend the market order, it proceeds by emptying out critical modes
of activism and creativity. According to Brown (2015), neoliberal reason
   CIVIC LITERACY AND ART EDUCATION: RESISTING AN INTERPASSIVE…    83

is converting the unruliness of democratic political activity into economic

endeavors by divesting “the terms of liberal democratic justice of their
capacity to contest or to limit the reach of market values and distributions
into every quarter of life” (Brown 2015, p. 208). In Brown’s (2015) esti-
mation, liberal democratic institutions, principles, subjects, practices, and
habits may not survive this assault.

P21’s Civic Literacy

Within neoliberalism, issues related to citizenship are no longer left up to
the state, but are now the responsibility of the individual to get the self-­
help and training they need to develop related skills. As education is
restructured to deliver the tools required for a global economy, this citi-
zenship as self-empowerment is also being handed over to education
under such organizations as P21 through the teaching of civic literacy. It
is important to note that with the overt valuing of civic literacy within
P21, the claim that public institutions are focused on preparing homo eco-
nomicus at the risk of ignoring our potential role in nurturing homo politi-
cus appears to be a moot point. However, this isn’t the entire story, as I lay
out in subsequent sections of this chapter.
Within the P21 mandate, Civic Literacy is one of the interdisciplinary
themes that visual arts education is charged with instilling. A key P21
document I analyzed on this topic is titled Reimagining Citizenship for
the 21st Century (Partnership for 21st Century Skills n.d.-b). This so-
called “21st Century Citizenship Guide” (Partnership for 21st Century
Skills n.d.-b, p. 23) was supported by and created in consultation with
4H National Headquarters, iCivics, New Global Citizens, Rock the
Vote, Learning First Alliance, Council on Foreign Relations, and World
Savvy.
Among the listed “Demands of 21st Century Citizenship (Local, State,
National, Global)” found in the Reimagining Citizenship for the 21st
Century (Partnership for 21st Century Skills n.d.-b) document are

Understanding the functions, levels and processes of government

Exercising the rights and responsibilities of citizenship
Generating new ideas that help benefit communities
Using digital technologies to accomplish civic priorities
Leveraging social and cultural differences as a civic asset
Inspiring others towards a shared vision for the common good. (p. 14)
84   N.M. KALIN

Moreover, according to the Map for the Arts (Partnership for 21st
Century Skills n.d.-a):

Study in the arts provides a context for exploring the rights and obligations
of citizenship at the local, state, national and global levels as well as the
implications of civic decisions. Students who study the arts must be aware of
policies and laws affecting the creation and performance of their art forms
(notably, laws regarding intellectual property) as well as understanding how
local and global issues are influenced by the arts. More broadly, students in
the arts learn the self-control and sophisticated communications skills neces-
sary to work toward producing artistic products alone or in fruitful coopera-
tion with a group of peers. … The arts inculcate key lessons for participation
in a democracy, as they balance the preservation of ideas with the challeng-
ing of old ways and the development of new visions. (p. 16, italics added for
emphasis)

P21’s version of civic literacy encompasses learning the rights, privi-

leges, and duties of citizenship, as well as its related international and net-
worked components. It appears to gloss over political disagreement or
critical confrontation as an ongoing commitment on the part of citizens to
the practice of democracy (Biesta 2011). However, there is more to it than
a fixed set of civic literacy skills. With the inclusion of that last passage
above, “[t]he arts inculcate key lessons for participation in a democracy, as
they balance the preservation of ideas with the challenging of old ways and
the development of new visions,” in the Map for the Arts (Partnership for
21st Century Skills n.d.-a, p.  16), P21 also acknowledges the intricate
dance between reproduction and reinvention in democratic politics
enabled by the arts.
This announces an intriguing opening for the intersection of art and
civics that might be operationalized in ways that inspire more than subser-
vience in civic education through a marrying of art and creativity educa-
tion with civics that embraces the civic subjectification, dissensus, and
politics required by a democratic public life. As Rancière (1992/2007)
articulates, “[d]emocracy does not exist simply because the law declares
individuals equal and the collectivity master of itself. It still requires the
force of the demos” (Rancière 1992/2007, p. 32, italics in original). This
obliges the democratic passions of the public to not be diluted, diverted,
or delimited, especially through schooling. It is up to us as people to seek
out political disagreement or critical confrontation as an ongoing commit-
ment on the part of citizens to the practice of democracy (Biesta 2011).
   CIVIC LITERACY AND ART EDUCATION: RESISTING AN INTERPASSIVE…    85

Heeding this call, I explore the opening offered within P21’s mandate for
civic literacy in art education that embraces dissent. Specifically, I delve
into the possibilities of art, creativity, and citizenship education meeting at
the point of antagonism and dissensus where the demos—the political
capacity of the subject—might be sparked to contest and subvert hege-
mony in society, instead of strictly focusing on maintaining and reproduc-
ing the current order. To begin with, I consider the contradictory notion
of civic literacy as a ground ripe for dissensus.

Educating Capable Citizens

P21 identifies the basic competencies a student is responsible for learning
in regard to the human and social capital required in democratic society.
In this way, right from the onset students are assumed to be civically deficit
and in need of training for full participation in civil society.

One potential danger of this situation is that education is maneuvered into

a position where it contributes to a domestication of the citizen—a ‘pinning
down’ of citizens to a particular civic identity—and thus leads to the erosion
of more political interpretations of citizenship that see the meaning of citi-
zenship as essentially contested. (Biesta 2011, p.  142, italics from the
original)

P21 appears to be pressuring education into delimiting citizenship

toward civic disengagement, consensus, and social cohesion in citizenship
as predefined and consensual, effectively taking the politics out of it.
Moreover, the flattening, simplification, and depoliticization of citizen-
ship into civic literacy in a manner that can demonstrate mastery in pre-
dictable ways aims to reproduce the existing possibility of civics itself.
Indeed, the very notion of civic literacies “lacks a sense of the situatedness
of democratic problems, of historical variations in the potential for demo-
cratic transformation, and of the crucial role played by local conditions,
resources, and obstacles” (Marginson 2006, p. 210). Reducing the com-
plexity of citizenship makes it less dangerous, but also, in a neoliberal spin,
it makes civics seem more democratic because it is less the domain of
specialist experts and more an area of learnable skills in the form of litera-
cies. In this way, boiling down citizenship into an accessible and compre-
hensible literacy fulfills a populist agenda that through civic literacy all
citizens will be empowered “to join in socially and economically reward-
ing activities” (Peers 2011, p. 423).
86   N.M. KALIN

Even though the processes of ‘literizing’ civics might appear to be a

democratizing move, it ultimately narrows the free exploration of the not-­
yet-­possible, de-complexifying the diversity that might yet surface that is
in itself democratic. This is where art and creativity education might lever-
age an opening beyond facilitating the learning of “policies and laws
affecting the creation and performance of their art forms” (Partnership for
21st Century Skills n.d.-a, p.  16). In the meantime, the complexity and
disparity associated with democratic politics is ignored, making civic liter-
acy an empty equality amounting to the production of “social and political
illiteracy” (De Lissovoy et  al. 2015, p.  65) as well as civic illiteracy in
teachers and students. Again, this appears to be civics without politics
(BAVO 2007, p. 19).
A contrast to this limited framing may be found in Finland. Sahlberg
(2017) claims that Finnish culture backs the need for active citizenship
and this is increasingly reflected in their recent national core curriculum
revisions. The Finnish National Board of Education’s (2016) new stan-
dards are far reaching and radical in many ways. In regard to civics educa-
tion, the current number of hours devoted to civics lessons is to be
increased during the nine-year basic education.1 This emphasis reflects
Finnish society at this time. According to Sahlberg (2017), Finns

believe democracy requires that all citizens take an active role in thinking
about issues that affect our country, including protecting the environment
and growing the economy. Young people need to be taught what demo-
cratic and civic processes look like and what each of us can do to improve
our own lives and the lives of those around us. (para. 9)

These amendments to the core curriculum do not happen in a vacuum as

democratic and civic processes are integrated into the school culture to
actually practice these values. The overall aim is for schools to function as
learning organizations that systematically promote participation and
democracy in how they operate and in what they teach to the point where
students have a say in how and what they will be taught (Finnish National
Board of Education 2016).2 While these reforms are still filtered through
neoliberal values with civics learning being tied to “growing the econ-
omy,” Finnish reforms position themselves in contradistinction to other
GERM exemplars such as P21.
As it stands within P21, art education is supposed to already know the
type of civic literacy it expects of students, thereby limiting itself to the
   CIVIC LITERACY AND ART EDUCATION: RESISTING AN INTERPASSIVE…    87

reproduction of what is already in place, effectively displacing a citizenship-­

to-­come. While everyone is allotted a role and a place within a social order,
only certain bodies are permitted to participate in political decisions
(Biesta 2011). According to Rancière’s (1995/1999) definitions, demo-
cratic politics encompasses the processes of confrontation and disruption
of any given order of assigned status through an assertion of equality that
reconfigures exclusions. Schooling, acting as police order, offers the olive
branch of civic literacy to its presumed passive and incapable students in
the name of democratic education that amounts to democratic overtures
without democracy, in effect possibly further debilitating future genera-
tions from democratic politics. Any curriculum that wards against antago-
nisms cannot be democratic; nevertheless, students in school are controlled
to minimize antagonistic relations and politicized possibilities, with teach-
ers molding students into future citizens as workers. While students have
the right to exist within the institutions of schooling largely as noise, they
have little power to be heard, understood, or seen beyond how they meet
the expectations of the already established common sense of the police
order, as mirrored and directed by schooling.

Citizenship Education as a Hatred of Democracy

As laid out, P21’s dictate for civic literacy is conceived as skills that are
static and transmissible. This particular aspect of P21 sets up an art educa-
tion for citizenship manifesting a hatred of democracy (Rancière
2005/2009). Let me explain. In codifying citizenship education as skills
to be transferred to incapable students—not unlike the majority of educa-
tional standards—we risk delimiting democratic action while assuming
that art education students are incapable of knowing what to do as citi-
zens. In this way, we commence from a premise of inequality—those who
know must transfer their know-how to those who don’t know.
Students within P21 are conceived as deficient and in urgent need of
civics indoctrination through teaching. As the logic goes, everyone equally
deserves this inculcation so that they can reach their emancipation through
employment. This is the cause and effect of teaching—through content
acquisition, we will all be equal. The assumption is that the population
cannot design or express political views or solutions on their own without
training, skills, and dispositions, now to be offered in schooling through
civic literacy. This is a muted form of civic and political engagement main-
taining the status quo with the intension that students will be able to go
88   N.M. KALIN

on after schooling to determine their own political actions so that, at some

point, passive learners will be liberated into sovereign action.
According to Rancière (2005/2009), democracy is not lived in, it is
struggled for. Rancière (2005/2009) maintains that democracy provokes
hatred in the police order that works to disguise its fear through reducing
the threat of politics manifested in the banishing of the democratic supple-
ment. In P21’s case, civic literacy is laid out in a manner that depoliticizes
political matters, shrinking the public sphere into the private domain—as
an individual you need to be educated in order to be literate in civics. In
fact, we sustain a post-politics in this mode when we embrace art and citi-
zenship education as depoliticized, enacting a politics without politics—
you will learn to be civically literate in pre-set ways without ever being
empowered to enact your own version of citizenship as a student.
In contrast to Finnish reforms, P21 envisions schooling working as the
police of the commonsense order, maintaining the distribution of roles
and places corresponding to what particular bodies can do, be, say, hear,
and see (Rancière 1995/1999). As the police, educators maintain order
by making sure that their students adhere to their allotted roles, tasks, and
places for particular ways of doing, being, seeing, creating, and saying
through pre-established rules and standards of what and who counts. This
policing thwarts politics. An apolitical education facilitates apolitical sub-
jects in its silencing of dissent, placing limits on speech, and setting condi-
tions on what can be thought and by whom. In the case of civic education,
this absurdly amounts to the masking of inequality in the name of civic
literacy for democracy.
Dissimilarity, within Rancière’s (1991) principle of equality, implies that
any person is always and already considered capable of active citizenship as
a speaking being, regardless of their previous training or assigned status and
presumed intellectual abilities within any given partition of the sensible—in
P21’s case, this partition is represented by consensual and fixed definitions
of civics literacy. Each student has the right to speak, assert equality within
a community of equal beings, be heard as a citizen-­participant in monitor-
ing and transforming police orders. They act on the basis of their own
equality as capable citizens. Starting from a premise of equality requires
that we seek to verify this axiom in relation to our actions as educators.

Taking equality as presupposition means we don’t ask how we may help

people achieve the equality of consciousness that would allow them to reflect
on their situation intelligently; rather, we ask what new possibilities emerge
   CIVIC LITERACY AND ART EDUCATION: RESISTING AN INTERPASSIVE…    89

when people are treated as if they already have equality of consciousness and
already reflect intelligently upon their situation. (Ruitenberg 2015, p. 2)

Therefore, if democratic action begins with the ability “to detect a con-
tradiction with the principle of equality” (Rancière 1995/1999, p. 110),
then we are enacting a hatred of democracy in commencing our work
from the basis of a presumed inequality. The assumption of inequality that
makes necessary planned training of the population by teachers acting as
master explicators in the name of democracy produces hierarchies keeping
common sense intact. In this way, educators working toward greater
equality actually negate democracy through policing the common sense
handed down by P21. The contradiction of citizenship education as
oppressive instead of emancipatory is played out as the assumption that
you can’t be a citizen until you are literate, thereby limiting intellectual
emancipation in the name of a more participatory democracy. Instead of
dismissing the potential equality asserted in a renewed focus on civic lit-
eracy as mere hypocrisy to be unveiled as inequality, citizenship education
could act as a place within the police order for entering into a dispute over
who has the right to speak, interpret, and be heard on the topic through
the verification of equality. Simply put, what if we started from believing
in the equality of individuals as intelligent and reasonable beings (Rancière
1991)? I believe this is what the Finnish National Board of Education’s
(2016) reforms are attempting.

Ignorant Citizens
A predicament for education toward citizenship is that intellectual eman-
cipation “cannot be institutionalized without becoming instruction of the
people” (Rancière 1995/1999, p.  34). Planned citizenship reinscribes
inequality onto the aura of education for democratic humanism that is in
line with “the fiction of inequality” (Rancière 1995/1999, p.  34) that
does not embrace democratic participation or the enactment of citizenship
(Ruitenberg 2015). Any education that already knows what it expects of
its pupils delimits itself to the reproduction of what is already in place,
thereby effectively displacing a citizenship-to-come.
According to Rancière (1995/1999), politics involves modes of
­subjectification that are contradictory to police logic “by transforming
identities defined in the natural order of the allocation of functions and
places into instances of experience of a dispute” (p. 36). Subjectification,
90   N.M. KALIN

or leaving space for the becoming of subjects not articulated in advance by

an existing order, so integral to the invention of democracy, should also be
integral to education (De Lissovoy et  al. 2015). Subjectification in this
instance “is the moment where speech as different from repetition might
happen” (Biesta 2013, p. 76).
As Robinson (2016) cautions, schools can play vital roles in cultivating
a sense of citizenship that won’t be realized “by running academic courses
on civics but by being the sorts of places that practice these principles in
how they operate every day” (p. 51). On its own, P21’s civic literacy pro-
poses civic socialization without opportunities for civic subjectification,
which would instead emphasize the emergent agency within civic learning
that promotes political subjectivity (Biesta 2011) currently, not some
time in the future. This civic subjectification would entertain citizenship
education as a preparation for a democracy-to-come, that does not yet
exist and must be invoked in the here and now under the assumption of a
radical equality between students, educators, and citizens who register
disputes with existing police order. Instead of assuming the ignorance of
students, “[t]his is a kind of teaching that not only recognizes the validity
of students’ agency and knowledge but even depends on them, not as
settled powers but as open-ended processes and potentialities” (De
Lissovoy et al. 2015, p. 89). Consequently, citizenship education could
be re-envisioned as “an ‘exposure’ to and engagement with the experi-
ment of democracy. It is this very engagement that is subjectifying”
(Biesta 2011, p. 152).
In light of this, Biesta’s (2011) notion of the ignorant citizen who
defies any pre-set civic identity or domestication by education of students
into what might be considered a “good citizen” within the existing politi-
cal order may be the most apt framing of what I am advocating. This re-­
characterizes art and citizenship education as opportunities for the creation
and transformation of political subjectivities not “driven by knowledge
about what the citizen is or should become” but “engendered through
engagement in always undetermined political processes” (Biesta 2011,
p. 142).
How might art education contribute to the construction of new politi-
cal subjectivities through civic literacy? If art educators might avoid deter-
mining in advance specific civic identities that facilitate the domestication
of the citizen, this might lead to “the erosion of more political interpreta-
tions of citizenship that see the meaning of citizenship as essentially con-
tested” (Biesta 2011, p.  142) and ripe for dissensus. What if we didn’t
   CIVIC LITERACY AND ART EDUCATION: RESISTING AN INTERPASSIVE…    91

perpetuate art education as a reinforcement of students’ incapabilities and

instead considered them speaking beings capable within art education as a
political struggle? Might we reimagine art education as a site of critical and
creative experimentation and investigation with democratic political
engagement despite the inequality in its current manifestations?
In a sense, public education might experiment with reconfigurations of
democratic society through challenging what already is. Not unlike forms
of emancipatory democracy whose limits are impossible to set out in
advance, “[i]n this process, the teacher’s job is not to ensure the coher-
ence of a controlled experiment but to provoke an investigation whose
outcome cannot be anticipated” (De Lissovoy et  al. 2015, p.  88).
Moreover, this teaching situation

becomes a laboratory for the construction of new modes of relationship and

collective activity, and thus of social life itself. This project depends on a
generosity that recognizes that the possibilities that the teacher makes avail-
able to students must be fundamentally reorganized by them. (De Lissovoy
et al. 2015, p. 89)

Ironically, P21’s (Partnership for 21st Century Skills n.d.-a) stated aims
for participatory citizenship and the challenging of old ways through art
stand in contradistinction to the status quo of schooling and standardized
curriculum based on inequality. While there is a certain amount of trans-
mission in the presentation of civic literacy, this is coupled with the
­invitation for students to dispute the given. How might art and creativity
educate ignorant citizens?

Art as Minority Democracy

It occurs to me that what we are risking here is a paradoxical instance of
an interpassive (see Žižek 1997) civics, wherein P21’s focus on civic liter-
acy risks never endangering the police order but, rather, just maintaining
neoliberal order. Robinson (2016) echoes my warning in the following
quote:

Citizenship education is not about promoting conformity and the status

quo. It is about championing the need for equal rights, the value of dissent,
and the need to balance personal freedom with the rights of others to live in
peace. (p. 140)
92   N.M. KALIN

In the rush to prove creativity education’s worth in meeting the needs of

market fundamentalism across the global economy, we cannot forget that
art and democracy hold polyphonic and post-fundamental possibilities
(Gielen 2011, p. 8). Brown (2015) asserts that if liberal democratic prin-
ciples could operate “in a different lexical and semiotic register from capi-
tal” then they could be “mobilized to limit capitalist productions of value
and market distributions; they could be a platform for critiques of those
values and distributions, and they could gestate more radical democratic
aspirations” (p. 208). It seems to me that this opposing register could be
the realm of critical creative art practice “that throws fundamental ques-
tions at the ruling order and tirelessly confronts it with its inconvenient
truths” (BAVO 2007, p. 24).
Under Rancière’s (2008/2009) aesthetic regime, art and metaphor
create forms of subjectivity which can reconfigure “the distribution of the
sensible” (p. 12) within the arrangements of a community, thereby dis-
rupting a current and contingent logic of inequality. Art as politics moves
toward a dissensus, a rupture, or productive gap in common sense and the
distribution of the sensible to the invention of new forms and arrange-
ments, amending what can be seen, created, heard, named, or counted.
Additionally, art can be a site of emancipation and equality through the
redistribution of the sensible within a given political system. Following the
principle of equality, any viewer is deemed already active and capable of
understanding an artist’s work without explanation.
In philosopher Paolo Virno’s (2012) view, art can provide a transgres-
sive dismeasure within the common sense of a society through aesthetic,
formal, political, or cognitive modes. In its deviation from the norm, a
dismeasure announces contingency—the possibility that circumstances
could be otherwise—leading to debate and dissent regarding differing
opinions and interpretations (Gielen 2011). In this way, art parallels poli-
tics in its reliance on arguments and counter-arguments. Within the con-
tingency of democracy, the minority (when contrasted with liberal
democracy as the majority democracy) may offer a dismeasure against com-
mon sense in the art world or democratic society (Gielen 2011, pp. 8–10).

Within a minority model, one can only gain a position or obtain a broader
social basis by means of argumentation. One only gains a voice by making
one’s choices public, not by anonymously checking a box in a polling booth.
If one seeks one’s way by argumentation, however, a confrontation with
other minorities who are also claiming a position is inevitable. In other
words, a minority democracy is agonistic. (Gielen 2011, p. 10)
   CIVIC LITERACY AND ART EDUCATION: RESISTING AN INTERPASSIVE…    93

Alas, under neoliberalism “[s]paces for critical autonomy tend to be

squeezed out and critical capacities atrophy, leaving conformity and resig-
nation as the paths of least resistance” (Ray 2011, p. 169). The incongru-
ity of education in which creativity becomes oppressively conformist,
demonstrates neoliberalism’s debilitation of democratic practices and cul-
tures that do not extend the market order. Creativity education as public/
political good becomes nonexistent since it falls outside creativity educa-
tion for economic good. Moreover, the so-called democratization of cre-
ativity subsumes creative activity within neoliberal anti-elitism. Creativity
as a form of politics, social activism, or subversion is considered no longer
necessary, since creativity itself has been democratized. It is tragically
ironic that the very capacities to contest or limit the reach of neoliberal
economization such as critical thinking and creativity are the very skills
that have been co-opted to accelerate economization through the voca-
tionalization of education.
According to Gielen (2013), the current societal hysteria around cre-
ativity marks the end of critical and political creativity at the hands of
neoliberalism, transformed into a fetishized representative of its former
functions (p.  103). Gielen (2013) calls this creativity “stripped of its
critical potential” and “substance” creativism (p. 96). This form of cre-
ativity embodies a fundamentalism as “[t]he obsession with creativity for
the sake of creativity suppresses the ideological parameters involved. It
obscures the fact that in this creativity society is being shaped in a specific
way” (Gielen 2013, p. 96) as it bends to neoliberal tenets. When creativ-
ity is released from the exclusive purview of the arts, it risks becoming
decontextualized and formulaic, “devoid of any ardent belief, ideology
or conviction. The creative deed must be depoliticised, in other words”
(Gielen 2013, p. 52). Creativity bereft of political opposition or social
critique is also more readily appropriated (Adams and Owens 2016,
p. 16) and marketable, which may be the ultimate goal for creativity and
its education under neoliberalism. Gielen (2013) goes on to claim that
“creativistic individuals can’t do anything but push and pull a little
within the boundaries of their—neoliberal—culture without being truly
creative, revolutionary or vertical” (p.  96). This is creative capitalism.
The constant need for innovation depoliticizes creativity, leaving little
time to reflect on what should matter (Gielen 2013, pp. 95–96). jagodz-
inski (2015) has described this predicament as the “terror of creativity”
(p. 60).
94   N.M. KALIN

Are there no alternatives? Are we left resigned to political impotence

and irresponsibility as if—again in the words of Margaret Thatcher—
“there is no alternative” (see Berlinski 2008).
The cultural industry, as an arm of neoliberalism, is also apt to under-
mine and absorb subversive and artistic autonomy, but not entirely (Ray
2011, p.  175). Unlike innovative creativity whose motives tend to be
aligned with capitalism toward the “calculated production of cultural
commodities,” subversive creativity requires relative autonomy (Ray 2011,
p. 175), wherein it can stand back from a situation—while still being in
relation to it—in order to actualize resistance. What if such a relative
autonomy were considered within the coming together of art, creativity,
and civic education? What if we transformed art classes “into political
stages on which an instance of inequality and its contestation” (Klee 2013,
p. 186) might be staged?
Following Gramsci (1971/1992), art, creativity, and citizenship educa-
tion might be enacted to not only instill and reproduce common sense,
but also to disarticulate hegemony through counter-hegemonic interven-
tions in visual art. Congruently, Chantal Mouffe (2013) stands behind
art’s political potential “as agonistic interventions within the context of
counter-hegemonic struggles” (p. 88), particularly because “artistic prac-
tices play a role in the constitution and maintenance of a given symbolic
order, or in its challenging, and this is why they necessarily have a political
dimension” (p. 91). This art that is committed and concerned with chang-
ing our current police orders and breaking with dominant forms of subjec-
tification Mouffe (2013) terms artivism.
What if art and creativity education for citizenship were engaged in
critical and activist artistic practices such as artivism mobilized as counter-­
hegemonic challenges to neoliberal consensus? Situating art education
curriculum within democratic problems and resources for transformation
might make our classrooms more hospitable to supporting student artists’
initiatives as activists engaged in critical praxis so that “teachers can expand
the terrain for radical democratic work without appropriating from the
students the sole authority to direct it” (De Lissovoy et al. 2015, p. 85).
What if art and creativity education considered the political potentialities
of forms of art through changing “the coordinates of the given” (Rancière
2007, p. 267) handed down from hegemonic police logics, wherein stu-
dents might be free to critically and creatively contest any “political wrong
which strikes them as the most appropriate to their life-world?” (Klee
2013, p. 187). Might collective dissensual activity aimed at transforming
   CIVIC LITERACY AND ART EDUCATION: RESISTING AN INTERPASSIVE…    95

the police order empower students into an active politicality of artist/

activists that would challenge the status quo toward alternatives?

Art Education as Distrusting Order

Through intervening in human perception so that we can perceive in new
ways without prescribed messages or purpose, how might art making
and/or viewing interrupt the common sense and facilitate the construc-
tion of new subjectivities against the current police order? Visual art, like
poetry, works through metaphor and “the contingency of the poetic con-
dition of language” (Säfström 2013, p.  140), potentially acting in the
realm of political action as it opens up the connections between percep-
tion and meaning to new configurations which may be unrecognizable or
nonsensical to the existing police order. In this struggle for new percep-
tions, “one has to stop making more sense, and change sense instead: in
and through a community of poets, the wrong people can speak” (Säfström
2013, p. 140). In this instance, the police order actually needs to be dis-
trusted: “It is an educational distrust, insofar as it reconnects knowledge
claims to the questions giving rise to them” (Säfström 2013, p. 140).
This is a huge leap for educators to envision today. If we continually
revive the cause-effect equation of education in every class period by lock-
ing in the learning outcomes we will meet beforehand, readying our labor
for administrator review, if we are buying into the hype that we are respon-
sible for economic disparity and our current post-politics because we
haven’t taught these topics sufficiently or correctly in underfunded
schools, then we very possibly haven’t had a second to contemplate the
contingent condition of knowledge. For to imagine that learning encom-
passes making intelligible that which was once unintelligible means we
have to give way to a fundamental distrust of the given perceptual scheme
(Säfström 2013, p.  140). I’m not saying that we have to take what is
already intelligible from experts and translate this to ignorant students,
but that what we may not be able to make sense of in the unintelligible is
actually where alternative sense may be found. To me, this is the aperture
creativity education has to expose and occupy going forward.
In art education, requiring students to simply replicate what the
teacher/expert already knows sets up an education of inequality and main-
tenance of the police order, with the teacher representing the police.
Nevertheless, if there is a root of distrust in this order, we are on the quest
for something and someone we haven’t made sense of yet. Through this
96   N.M. KALIN

distrust, we reconnect knowledge to its contingent condition, reminding

“us of the contingent conditions of life itself, the possibility of everything
being something or anything else” (Säfström 2013, p. 140). This is the
essence of art, creativity, and their education to which no other domains
outside of the arts aspire. It is also what is in serious jeopardy under the
neoliberal instrumentalization and vocationalization of education as a
whole.
A distrusting art education seems at the heart of Atkinson’s (2017)
embrace of the event of disobedience for a student of art to precipitate a new
subjectivation. This disobedience is only occasioned outside of hylomor-
phic forms that impose predetermined form or frameworks (such as civic
literacies through visual art education) upon passive matter in ways that
presuppose how one is to act, think, understand, and create.
Correspondingly, disobedient pedagogies promote an experimental stance
in relation to the challenging of established and totalizing criteria through
disobedient objects and practices in art and creativity learning that may
come across as a-grammatical in their violation and rejecting of norms. Art
teachers may encounter such disobedience of their pedagogical expecta-
tions on a daily basis, and instead of reconsidering their own limited views
from a stance of wonder in relation to what they didn’t previously think
possible, they may ignore, redirect, discourage, reprimand, and/or nega-
tively assess such efforts as negatively disobedient. For Atkinson (2017)
this recurring circumstance offers pedagogues a moment to consider for
whom learning is relevant. This is a key question I’ve negotiated within
this volume in regard to creativity education today, as governmental agen-
das across the globe are placing more and more emphasis on learning for
economic rationales to feed market fundamentalism at the cost of learning
for an as yet possible world to come.
These convictions are echoed in Rotas and Springgay’s (2013) article
addressing a politics-to-come emerging from a classroom operating like
a work of art (broadening the question posed by Guattari [1995]). Rotas
and Springgay (2013) claim this notion puts forward a form of “educa-
tion far too important to surrender to the stultifying forces of a peda-
gogy that ‘is’” (p. 288). Instead, activating a classroom as a work of art
puts everything into question, and opens up experience to exploration,
while embracing new growth emanating from “a politics that resides
between the known and the yet-to-come” (Rotas and Springgay 2013,
p. 288).
   CIVIC LITERACY AND ART EDUCATION: RESISTING AN INTERPASSIVE…    97

If we extend this in-between space of growth into the topics under

analysis in this chapter, P21’s civic literacy might be embraced as contin-
gent content through both student and teacher actively distrusting the
order this literacy represents. The second part of this double move involves
the assumption of equality in the moment—“[t]hat is, education is an
assumption of the possibility of speech on the part of both teacher and
student” (Säfström 2013, p. 140). So, in order to operate within the realm
of politics, we need the order as encapsulated by civic literacy so that it
might be reanimated through listening for the “wrong people” so that
their as-yet-unintelligible perceptions of what, where, and whom is mean-
ingfully expanded toward alternatives from how things currently are. In
this way, teaching is a liberating act where the inequality of the police
order as classroom is continually confirming equality shifted through per-
ceptual schemes that disarticulate the current partition of the sensible.
This is also what we might ask of our students to undertake as creators of
art and what artists provoke viewers to explore with their artworks.

Provocation and Responsibility
Within the frictions of neoliberal forms of schooling and democratic prac-
tices in education, we find the attempted absorption of civics into art and
creativity education. Teaching sedimented grammars of civic literacy alone
in the art classroom risks obstructing challenges to current conceptions of
citizenship, as well as the creative generation of alternative modes of
­citizenship. P21’s paradoxical mandate for the coupling of civic and visual
arts education offers both enclosure and radical possibility. Although the
description of the potential role of the arts in participatory democracy is
identified as both upholding and challenging tradition, to my reading, this
statement strongly contradicts the more passive and solution-oriented
civic literacy also outlined in P21. Yet, this not only offers a provocation
to dispute a given police order, it also poses a responsibility.
This tension is inherently post-consensual and discordant, which makes
it ripe for dissensual and democratic imaginaries. In particular, the neolib-
eral police order as manifested within the P21 conception of civic literacy
could be the site for more democratic practices of art and creativity educa-
tion along with activist explorations of political art forms. These efforts
may go some way in enacting the intersection of art and citizenship educa-
tion as a site of struggle and emancipation instead of perpetuating a hatred
98   N.M. KALIN

of democracy that undermines civic subjectification. This form of educa-

tion as struggle depends on its students’ equality of intelligence to gener-
ate unfamiliar forms of knowledge and ways of being that should be at the
heart of attempts at democratic learning in creativity education.3

Notes
1. Coincidentally, the number of lesson-hours in arts and crafts also increased
considerably (Finnish National Board of Education 2016).
2. This rather unique and recent Finnish version of GERM is explored further
in the next chapter.
3. Recently Sabol (2017) reminded art educators that the visual arts are a form
of speech “protected by the U.S. Constitution as a right among citizens of
the United States” (p. 9). As such, art education may facilitate “students and
all citizens in using their guaranteed right of freedom of speech in the pur-
suit of social justice while improving the quality of life each of us enjoy as
Americans” (p. 11).

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 CHAPTER 6

(Neoliberalized) Collaborative Turn

and Art Education

Abstract  This chapter lays out the broader contexts from which collabo-
ration comes to the foreground at this time and sounds a number of cau-
tions against the collaborative turn as evidenced in the 21st Century Skills,
new Finnish National Curriculum Framework, and cultural industries.
Collaboration’s promotion is due to post-Fordist labor models and the
rise of network structures. Within this nexus, collaboration maintains a
democratic aura of a horizontal, decentralized platform for learning and
creating that resists and subverts more restrictive vertical power structures.
To flesh out these movements, I consider the model of project work within
post-Fordist labor along with precarious, post-studio practices associated
with the cultural and creative industries. I assert an appeal for the auton-
omy of collaboration within art education apart from entrepreneurial
ends.

Keywords  Creativity • Discipline • Collaboration • Finnish education •

Post-Fordism

The previous chapter worked through a model of democratic education

that is rooted in an idea of participatory politics and radical democracy,
which encompasses agonistic, collective forms of deliberation that engen-
der new modes of critique. This model may seem to align well with the

© The Author(s) 2018 101

N.M. Kalin, The Neoliberalization of Creativity Education,
Creativity, Education and the Arts,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71525-4_6
102   N.M. KALIN

widespread embrace of collaboration in education among students and

teachers, as well as among students and teachers together. However, it is
important to make a distinction between forms of collaboration that sup-
port neoliberal imperatives, in the guise of a seemingly empowering hori-
zontalism, and forms that challenge neoliberalism. Even truly innovative
approaches to collaboration in curriculum, like recent Finnish examples,
illustrate both the potential for a radical art and creativity education along
with the danger that such collaboration in education can be channeled
back into neoliberal forms of education. To my reading, it is a version of
neoliberalism-friendly collaboration that is envisioned in P21.
The current chapter lays out the broader landscape from which collabo-
ration comes to the foreground at this time and sounds a number of cau-
tions against the (neoliberalized) collaborative turn in art and creativity
education. The rise of collaboration isn’t just a neutral development
devoid of political and ideological underpinnings. Capitalism, so the logic
goes, is against collaboration because it thwarts the individualism required
for competitive markets and entrepreneurialism. Yet, if our GERM exam-
ple of P21 is any indication of neoliberal priorities, collaboration is not the
threat we might have been led to believe as collaboration figures largely in
mandates for career readiness and our working lives today.1
As I’ve been articulating throughout the pages of this book, creativity
is a competency and qualification needed for employment in post-Fordist
society. Post-Fordism has raised the requirements by which knowledge is
considered necessary for productive performance on the job, and the
knowledge I have acquired at an educational institution, a university, or a
school is no longer enough. Social skills and the ability to work in a team,
for example, are necessary qualifications I now need to bring to the job.
Paradoxically, the collaborative, which was once synonymous with activist
and critical art practices, now conceals its own depoliticization in order to
better meet economic imperatives.
It is essential to pursue collaboration in ways that foster dissensus, not
compliance, creating forms that feed critical democratic interactions, not
just ingenious ways to meet predetermined ends. Art education’s well-­
founded distrust of the concept of the lone genius can work against demo-
cratic forms of collaboration because the eruption of dissensus, amid the
refusal of individuals within the group to accede to the forces of group
think, can appear as a destructive form of individualism in conflict with the
discipline’s commitment to collaborative educational forms. Nevertheless,
   (NEOLIBERALIZED) COLLABORATIVE TURN AND ART EDUCATION    103

the idea of inodus captures the kind of individual critique that both steps
outside of and sustains collaborative democratic endeavors.
To flesh out these perspectives, I revisit P21 and the recent reforms in
Finnish national curriculum and their implications for de-disciplined cre-
ativity through inter- or transdisciplinary collaboration. I then consider
project work within post-Fordist labor along with precarious, post-studio
art practices associated with the cultural industries. In sum, my argument
is that what we gain in relational, networked, and horizontal working
modes comes at the potential loss of expertise, dissenus, and sustained
antagonism, which ultimately thwarts innovation. I end with a plea for the
autonomy of collaboration within art education apart from entrepreneur-
ial ends and the autonomy of the individual artist to step out of the col-
laborative to name the errors in daily life.

Creative Capital and the Collective

Views on creativity run the continuum from individualized to collective
undertaking. Certainly, challenges to the isolated and talented genius art-
ist have been ongoing for decades as definitions of creativity edge more
toward nurture and farther away from inborn talent as its basis, echoed by
the democratizing of creativity. I maintain that creative endeavor is never
an individual capacity occurring in a vacuum but is always performed in
relation to others. Nancy’s (2000) notion of “being with” is pertinent
here in that we are never acting alone as “I” does not come before “we”
in our co-existence through processes of abandonment and exposure to
free individuals within community.
In the second chapter of this book, I articulated how neoliberalism runs
on individualization of responsibility in the face of increased withdrawal of
governmental regulation and services. As the economy goes, so follows
education as it takes up neoliberal concerns such as individualism and
competition aligned with the vocationalization and career-readiness goals
of schooling. This would appear to oppose any collaborative undertaking
as lacking value and watering down schooling’s compliance in assessing
and preparing individual students for participation in neoliberal econo-
mies based on competition. However, translated into standardized educa-
tion, as witnessed in P21, collaboration is morphed by the colonizing
logic of late capitalism into a skill devoid of resistance to authority or
subversion of competitive individualism.
104   N.M. KALIN

While collaboration might seem like a phenomenon far removed from

the world of work or industry, it is actually a hallmark of the creative
industries and post-Fordist immaterial labor, both of which have taken
over from manufacturing-based economies in post-industrial, late capital-
ism. Collaboration’s ascendance is, in part, due to post-Fordist labor mod-
els accompanied by the rise of network structures and behaviors across
societies. Within this nexus, collaboration maintains a democratic aura of
a horizontal, decentralized platform for learning and creating that resists
and subverts more restrictive vertical power structures such as those asso-
ciated with Paulo Freire’s banking model of schooling.
Congruently, the majority of contemporary approaches to creativity
education embrace the collaborative possibilities of creative process.
Sahlberg and Oldroyd (2010) claim that “social capital that is necessary in
productive group processes, whether in or out of school, is becoming
more important in the schools of those countries that are genuinely con-
cerned about their economic competitiveness” (p. 290). Moreover, “[i]
ndividual performance and inventions created by one person only have
given way to collective intelligence, shared knowledge and team-based
problem-solving” (Sahlberg and Oldroyd 2010, p. 290).
This represents a substantial shift as the individualism of the west, par-
ticularly the American version that promotes solitary competitive behav-
iors, is being asked to bend toward more sustained social generation of
knowledge, while Asian societies are having to carve more individualistic,
dissensual, and creative aspects into their educational mandates. This
change doesn’t come without difficulties. In perhaps oversimplified terms,
western countries’ emphasis on the individual over the group can be
uncomfortable to Asian nations that esteem group contributions over solo
achievements (OECD 2011, p. 147) and

value social order highly and see the high crime rates and general social dis-
order in many Western nations as simply unacceptable. On the other hand,
many people in the West are not willing to pay the price Asians pay for their
high levels of student achievement if it means giving up their “personal free-
dom.” (OECD 2012, p. 186)

In analyzing the differences between Chinese and American views on

creativity, Niu and Kaufman (2013) as well as Lan and Kaufman (2012)
have deduced that Americans embrace more revolutionary, novel, and
radical forms of creativity characterized as distinct, groundbreaking, and
   (NEOLIBERALIZED) COLLABORATIVE TURN AND ART EDUCATION    105

rare as expressions of personal freedom, whereas Chinese culture tends “to

appreciate creativity within constraints, such as reworking a traditional
concept” (p.  78). This embrace of the more pragmatic components of
creativity prioritizes usefulness and appropriateness over novelty (Niu and
Kaufman 2013, p. 83). Furthermore, Ng and Smith (2004) identified a
paradox in Asian classrooms claiming to promote creativity. Whereas
liberal-­democratic teaching attitudes associated with the west’s concentra-
tion on individualism have a significantly positive correlation with creativ-
ity, the converse was found with more conservative-autocratic teaching
dispositions. Creativity was positively impacted along with individualism
through liberal-democratic teaching attitudes, and as a result, the class-
room behaviors apparent in these classrooms were far from desired.
Creativity suffered under more autocratic teaching, but student behavior
was far more tolerable, in line with Asian cultural norms. If risk taking is
aggregated too much to pre-established outcomes, control limits creativ-
ity to the ‘right’ kinds of creativity through dictated means, even in con-
texts that consider themselves the freest such as in educational structures
in the United States. Any school culture needs to be wary that killing
students’ confidence as well as intrinsic creativity and motivation to learn
in the name of achievement and standards is an unethical, contradictory,
and shortsighted offense (Rubin 2014).
jagodzinski (2015b) further extends this tension, claiming that the cur-
rent neoliberal capitalist drives for cooperation simply mask the ultimate
urge for competition—it may no longer be the individual who wins but
there is still a best team that wins (p. 283). I would even go further with
an additional distinction. Neoliberalized collaboration is conceived as
comprising a group of individual entrepreneurs working collaboratively,
for a time. This leads me to Sahlberg and Oldroyd (2010), who offer even
finer distinctions of this paradoxical coupling. They contrast Schumpeter’s
(1943/2003) creative destruction2 with creative construction, the former
based on fear, conflict, competition, and aggression toward competitors
that amounts to negative social interdependence, while the latter includes
trust, collaboration, imagination, risk taking, and creativity culminating in
positive social interdependence. For Sahlberg and Oldroyd (2010) the aim
in schooling is to steer collaborative project work toward creative
­construction so that students are “able to improve their ‘soft’ skills, such
as helping behaviours and problem solving, and experience safety and
mutual trust” (p. 292).
106   N.M. KALIN

4Cs and Finnish Co-Creation

Collaboration is exceedingly embraced as a soft competence required for
post-industrial capitalism. As one of the 4Cs of P21’s Learning and
Innovation Skills, collaboration is identified as a skill that separates “stu-
dents who are prepared for increasingly complex life and work environ-
ments in the 21st century, and those who are not” (“Framework for 21st
Century Learning,” n.d., para. 8). Through collaboration, students need to

• Demonstrate ability to work effectively and respectfully with diverse

teams
• Exercise flexibility and willingness to be helpful in making necessary
compromises to accomplish a common goal
• Assume shared responsibility for collaborative work, and value the
individual contributions made by each team member. (“Collaboration
and Communication,” n.d., para. 2)

On another continent, Finland’s new National Curriculum Framework

(NCF) (Finnish National Board of Education 2016) (approved in 2014
with implementation commencing in 2016) echoes the goals of the
American Common Core State Standards in its integration of disciplines
across curricula to bolster thinking skills in students through application
to real-world problems. It also adheres to P21’s 4th C of Collaboration,
but NCF commits to collaboration in learning and teaching in ways few
other national curricula under GERM have yet ventured in order to simu-
late post-Fordist work environments.
Finnish schools are adopting phenomenon-based teaching, in addition
to the teaching of separate subjects such as art and mathematics.
Phenomenon-based teaching aims to harness interdisciplinary topics so
that students might better understand the interdependencies of content.
Each municipality and school in Finland has freedom in determining
learning goals and how these changes will be implemented in line with
national education laws. This decentralized model of planning from a
loose, guiding framework allows for local customization at the school and
classroom level that sets Finland apart. The grip of standardized teaching
and testing is not apparent in Finland, and this increased autonomy opens
up teachers and schools to more creative experimentation and collabora-
tive sharing of ideas. Trust in teachers is considered a better route to inno-
vative teaching and collaborative working environments than surveillance
(Sahlberg 2017a, June 7, para. 2).
   (NEOLIBERALIZED) COLLABORATIVE TURN AND ART EDUCATION    107

Sahlberg (2015c) relays that Finnish education policy prioritizes cre-

ativity, risk taking, and innovation through personalized and sustained
learning, inspiring classroom environments, along with creative teaching
based on student progress “primarily judged against their respective
characteristic and abilities, rather than by a reliance on uniform stan-
dards and statistical indicators” (p.  123). In order to accomplish this,
the school system, including management, has to value and trust teach-
ers as professionals to give them the autonomy they need to do their
jobs successfully. For risk taking, creativity, and innovation to be at the
heart of learning and teaching, teachers need to be encouraged and sup-
ported to experiment—if students are expected to be creative risk-tak-
ers, then their teachers need to exist within similar conditions.3 It
shouldn’t come as a surprise then that the world’s most successful edu-
cational systems as reported by the PISA results including South Korea,
Finland, and Singapore value well-­trained and compensated teachers
(Robinson 2016).
According to the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS)
from 2013, teachers in Finland work 13 hours less a week on average than
their counterparts in the United States and Finnish teachers teach 6 hours
less a week than American teachers (Sahlberg 2015a, October 5).
Therefore, “American teachers, on average, have less time beyond their
teaching duties to do something with their colleagues or alone than
Finnish teachers or teachers in most other OECD countries” (Sahlberg
2015a, October 5, para. 5). Additionally, “over half of American lower-­
secondary teachers report that they never teach jointly with other teachers
in the same classroom, and 42% of U.S. teachers report never engaging in
joint projects across classes or age groups” (Sahlberg 2015a, October 5,
para. 6).
Beyond cooperating with other teaching colleagues, Finnish teachers
are now even required to go so far as to collaborate with students to
design curriculum to best meet the broad objectives and core content
requirements of the national curriculum. In collaborating with students,
these teachers are also aiming to accommodate and foster the optimal
conditions for individual and group learning. Moreover, students are to be
engaged in the co-planning of the phenomenon-based study periods and
their associated lessons (Sahlberg 2015b, March 25). In order to improve
student engagement, students will be provided “more agency and a stron-
ger voice in planning and assessing project-based learning units” (Sahlberg
2017b, March 15, para. 7).
108   N.M. KALIN

The overall ambition is to transition Finnish schools into more collab-

orative learning communities. The holistic approach not only integrates
knowledge and skills in their application to existing problems that mirror
the skills needed in the workforce, but this scenario is said to motivate
students to learn in more meaningful and motivating ways. This project-­
based learning mode in schooling better equips students “to deal with
changes in the workplace as well as the growth of new technologies”
(Sahlberg 2017b, March 15, para. 9). Even though Finland’s most recent
PISA scores declined, these reforms are more aligned with the belief that
“schools should teach what young people need in their lives rather than
try to bring national test scores back to where they were” (Sahlberg
2015b, March 25). This really sets Finland apart from GERM initiatives’
laser focused on testing as the primary measure of schooling and teacher
effectiveness toward market-driven education policies.

De-Disciplined Collaboration
Collaboration seemingly defies standardized pedagogies synonymous with
control, conformity, and efficiency while concurrently challenging the
romantic idea of the remote artist. On the other hand, creativity today is
in the process of being unhooked from ‘artiness’ and demystified away
from the individual genius through being rearticulated and recontextual-
ized into the team, community, organization, and network to render it
more economically valuable (McWilliam and Haukka 2008). Collaboration,
like creativity and critical thinking, is a skill that is intended to increase
employability, producing “multi-purpose individuals who follow just one
important imperative: that of adaptation” (Gielen 2013, p. 30). As schools
oblige market demands, they mirror professional practices that value
­adaptivity and flexibility over depth of content knowledge. In this way, the
professionalization of creativity is being administered through teachers as
creative generalists instead of creative specialists. Standardizing creativity
across schooling implies that creativity can be emptied of its critical modes,
domesticated through measurement, and ultimately managed as an
orderly, predictable, and apolitical process. Creativity is being rewired as it
is exposed to a purely economic rationality.
Reflecting marketplace imperatives, P21 (Partnership for 21st Century
Skills n.d.) aims to produce creative thinkers with transferable skills that
can work among and beyond disciplines. This mandate (Plucker et  al.
n.d.) recommends that creativity be taught on its own as an entity divorced
   (NEOLIBERALIZED) COLLABORATIVE TURN AND ART EDUCATION    109

from disciplinary application, yet of value in its own right—“The ques-

tion, what and why and for whom something can be done with these abili-
ties, thus appears to be of no relevance” (von Osten 2011, p. 134). Instead,
creativity as a stand-alone skill, severed from art’s specificity, for example,
is trainable and exploitable because creativity without the ties of a field is
more readily flexibilized and transferable to a variety of domains in
response to changing market conditions. While discipline-based creativity,
grounded in depth of insight and craft, may be less susceptible to pleasing
the ever-shifting market forces, innovative creativity, on the other hand,
compels artists and others to “inevitably spend a lot more time looking
over their shoulder, trying to figure out what the customer wants rather
than what they themselves are seeking to say” (Deresiewicz 2015, n.p.).
The Finnish reforms also venture into this undoing through challeng-
ing the traditional, structural logic of school organization away from
subject-­based curriculum constructed on an outdated model of the
industrial world that focuses on discrete disciplines along with the sys-
tematic and standardized acquisition and mastery of knowledge for ease
of delivery, tracking, and assessment. This obsolete version, it is claimed,
neglects to adequately assist students in reaching their individual poten-
tials centered around their unique talents through the development of
creativity across subject areas (Sahlberg and Oldroyd 2010). Creativity in
the Finnish model is intended to thrive as basic knowledge is infused
with innovate teaching and cross-subject integration of knowledge that
do not have predetermined results. This is augmented with efforts
toward more customized learning for each child derived from the match-
ing of learning styles to individual students. This prioritizing of flexibility
within group dynamics through schooling reflects learning unshackled
by one specific domain, and this is what neoliberal collaboration sup-
ports in particular.
As McWillian and Haukka (2008) foresaw, creativity is being demysti-
fied and reconceptualized into a discrete set of skills that may be taught on
its own as creativity courses, not tied to art or any discipline for that mat-
ter. This is evidenced by the movement to “creatify” (Harris and
Ammermann 2016, p.  110) the curriculum through “non-art creative
activity” (p.  105) so that, in effect, creativity and critical thinking are
taught divorced from art’s specificity, but apparent across disciplines.
Further, Harris and Ammermann (2016) articulate how Australian educa-
tional policy has undergone a de-emphasis of art-based creativity as just
one part of a redefined creative education, worrying some that art
110   N.M. KALIN

e­ ducation is losing ground to an undisciplined or cross-curricular creativ-

ity, while “the value of creativity generated within arts disciplines is pri-
marily to be found in its broader application, linked to economic, industrial
and disciplinary priorities” (p. 106).
How much domain-specific knowledge is necessary and how far generic
creativity capacities can cut across any given domain are the sort of ques-
tions one might ask in response to this circumstance. Robinson (2016) has
maintained throughout his career that “creative work in any domain
involves increasing control of the knowledge, concepts, and practices that
have shaped that domain and a deepening understanding of the traditions
and achievements in which it is based” (p. 103). But he does go on to add
that “[i]t is true that creative work in any field involves a growing mastery
of skills and concepts. It is not true that they have to be mastered before
the creative work can begin” (Robinson 2016, p. 119). Creativity educa-
tion must seek the delicate balance to whatever discipline it is attempting
to creatify.
Collaboration and art in the contexts of co-created curriculum and
phenomena-based learning mimics how art and creativity ‘skills’ might be
integrated into business organizations where the brokering of ideas, mov-
ing them from one domain to another, may yield more value than generat-
ing a novel idea within a fixed discipline where an idea might be considered
facile. This form of collaborative creativity stands in contrast to the lone,
gifted genius toiling toward the generation of a new idea in a pre-set,
insulated domain, such as art on its own. In this version of collaborative
creativity, anyone might be considered creative who can import and export
an idea at the right time and in the most fortuitous context for optimal
effect.
Similarly, in the mode of co-created curriculum, we move farther away
from content delivery and the regurgitation of disciplinary knowledge.
Instead, teachers and groups of students are mutually involved in the
value-adding assembling and dis-assembling of information as learning
inches closer to adaptation, reorganizing, juxtaposing, and coediting
(McWilliam and Haukka 2008). In this way attention needs to shift from
individual performance of students to “the capacity to learn through their
own networks—to connect, access information and forge relationships in
and through dynamic and productive teams” (McWilliam and Haukka
2008, p.  663). Stated differently in another quote by McWilliam and
Haukka (2008), creative capacity building cannot be left up “to ‘arty’
types or IT gurus to develop ‘at the margins’” (p. 663).
   (NEOLIBERALIZED) COLLABORATIVE TURN AND ART EDUCATION    111

As the rate of workplace productivity cycles speed up, “all enterprise

associated with global production is now faster and less certain, demand-
ing more tolerance of ambiguity, more risk-taking, and more capacity
devoted to experiment, variety and adaptation on the run” (McWilliam
and Haukka 2008, p.  655) in order to compete in such a demanding
economic context as our current post-Fordism. McWilliam and Haukka
(2008) pull from the work of Zygmunt Bauman in their contention that
the need for depth of knowledge only goes so far as people can unlearn
this knowledge in applying it to problems that the specific skills and
know-­how were not meant for. Therefore, knowledge needs to travel
light as it is only valued in its innovative and timely (mis)application.
This is backed up by McWilliam and Haukka’s (2008) recommendation
that do-it-­yourself dispositions, the types of which can organically draw
from a network of ideas, are more important than expert knowledge in
creative capacity building. Likewise, Virno (2012) asserts that the desired
qualities of post-­Fordist labor have nothing to do with “professional
expertise or technical requirements. On the contrary, what’s required is
the ability to anticipate unexpected opportunities and coincidences, to
seize chances that present themselves, to move with the world” (p. 33).
Divorcing content from collaborative skills risks reducing collaboration
down to sociality and adaptability or collaboration for the sake of col-
laboration alone—in other words, “[a]ll open-ended adaptability and
responsiveness, no set vocation” (Relyea 2013, p. 5). In lieu of disciplin-
ary silos, we must broker our ideas on the open market of creative
collaboration.

Horizontalism Goes to Work

It should come as little surprise, then, that collaboration aligns strongly
with our current post-Fordist economy’s organizational norms and modes
of production that have been taking hold since the early 1980s (Boltanski
and Chiapello 1999/2005). Collaboration presents what might at first
blush appear as a schism between decentralized processes and individualis-
tic capitalist values, when, in actual fact, this apparent incongruity acts to
obscure a quite harmonious relationship. Collaboration promises a demo-
cratic remedy to both stultifying pedagogical practices and individualiza-
tion so synonymous with neoliberal values, but this egalitarian interpretation
of process ignores how post-Fordist labor requires collaborative skills and
how collaboration in education is meeting capitalist goals. Collaboration
112   N.M. KALIN

in this conception grants neoliberal motivations cover under its delusions

of agency in service of neoliberal determinants. In this manner, collabora-
tion has been neoliberalized, just as creativity has been (Adams 2013), to
only intensify dominant orders.
Ironically in today’s workforce, conformity is about being adaptable
instead of rigidly disciplined. This paradox of our time buttresses another
irony located in “society’s reigning belief in flexibility, flux, and the short-­
term as undeniably enduring and timeless values” (Relyea 2013, p. 49).
Alas, what we gain in flexibility and perceived autonomy within post-­
Fordist precarized labor models comes at a cost. Even within a horizontal
social structure and networked society, power is not confined to hierar-
chical, authoritarian, or centralized structures emanating from above. It
is distributed as it works through and on us so that collaboration, for
example, can both serve the dominant ideology of neoliberalism and
appear as a liberatory mechanism. Collaboration is not a radical end on
its own; neoliberal versions of collaboration do not represent a renegade
or activist movement to counter capitalism and the standardization of
education. In fact, as P21 and GERM mandates advocate, collaboration
is currently the standard endorsed by the mainstream common sense of
neoliberalism.
The fear is that under neoliberalism, we are experiencing the capitaliza-
tion of collaboration enacted as a form of social control whereby creativity
may very well be stimulated through the group, but it is more often than
not focused in a specific direction to benefit late capitalism otherwise rap-
idly redirected from any deviant course (Gielen 2013). If collaboration
isn’t reasonable, realistic, rational, or productive, it is nonsensical and a
waste of time and effort. Yet, as art educators likely appreciate, creativity
that isn’t dangerous or irrational risks mediocrity and stagnation (Gielen
2013, p. 68).
Collaboration assimilated into neoliberalized education risks suppress-
ing the resistant and dissensual potentials of collective groups while trans-
forming collaboration into a skill associated with conviviality, conformity,
and efficiency or what jagodzinski (2015a) terms “group think” (p. 60).
Compromise and consensus typically hold you to the lowest common
denominator or the least controversial perspectives. Correspondingly, col-
laboration fitted with the straightjacket of standardized education might
not have the bite of collective organizing with which it was once associated
as it is now mostly about quick turnover of an idea, and solution- or
production-generation.
   (NEOLIBERALIZED) COLLABORATIVE TURN AND ART EDUCATION    113

The Temporary Relevance of Project Work

Within the contemporary post-Fordist labor environment and networked
society, the best-functioning collective unit is the team since all members
can be held accountable for their individual efforts and responsibilities
(Gielen 2013). The emergent flow of information and mobile connection
momentarily accumulates and stabilizes through teams around project
work (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999/2005). As temporary binding
agents, collaborative projects bring together disparate individuals for set
purposes and time periods as needed. Unlike unions, institutions, political
parties, or social classes, the team is more flexible and adaptive to the tem-
porary project synonymous with immaterial labor than rigid and longer-­
lasting collective structures or solidarities (Gielen 2013, p. 37). The loss of
more durable labor is hardly lamented as the more precarious project-­
based labor and short-term contracts associated with the gig economy
come with the aura of greater autonomy than being tied to a single work-
place for one’s life.
Team-based project work is characterized as goal-oriented, solution-­
focused, and quick-changing, depending on group dynamics, trends, and
client needs, which leaves little time for depth of inquiry and reflection.
Creativity in this mode translates to being able to alter any one course at
the drop of a hat depending on changing requirements. Makeshift col-
laborations producing fragmentary, temporary solutions are “well-suited
to negotiate today’s entrepreneurial and communicational mandates, in
which supreme value is placed on flexibility, on the ability to improvise
identities and relationships” (Relyea 2013, p.  200). In a group project
­setting ideas come and go rapidly as relevance shifts and evolves. Moreover,
if a group member doesn’t keep up with the flow, they can be considered
irritating and inflexible.
Simultaneous to these changes in labor models, projects have increas-
ingly become the focus of creative production. Relyea (2013) claims that
today the older continuities of disciplinary canon or medium have been
replaced by professional conformity in the extent to which artists repro-
gram themselves with each new group and creative endeavor in order to
be nimbly responsive to trends and conditions (p.  24). Taking a stance
within a group can come across as maladaptive to collaboration.
Demonstrating depth and durability associated with institutions and disci-
plines is only useful as long as the project deems it relevant (Gielen 2013,
p. 51). A position, such as standing firm in one’s conviction grounded in
114   N.M. KALIN

technical or disciplinary know-how, may be regarded as egotistical, old-­

fashioned, unproductive, or stubborn in regard to the betterment of the
group. Taking root, being occupied, slowly contemplating, or becoming
an expert in relation to your creative work can all conflict with the mod-
esty and lack of rigidity required for networking within a group (Gielen
2013, p. 52). Group think, then, encapsulates the desire to capitulate spe-
cific interests to the whole so as to not weigh down the speed of innova-
tion and resolution development, or jeopardize the whole falling apart due
to selfish individualism.
Consequently, differences amongst individual views are often glossed
over for the sake of momentum and closure in the meeting of impending
deadlines. We all know what a downer it is to have someone not play by
the implicit rules of group work—who won’t concede or bend. By way of
pragmatism and efficiency, multiplicities as hard edges are filed down or
omitted completely. Through compromising, our delight in getting a
piece of the pie or a place at the table is often amplified—we are satisfied
with at least being heard or getting a bit of our perspective included.
Collaboration boils down to what is agreeable to the whole/majority/
client, which may temper daring in the name of consensus and economic
gain. Taken to its extreme, neoliberal modes of collaboration may consti-
tute the depoliticized potential of collaboration that is devoid of convic-
tion or criticality in its flexibility. A case in point, constructive collaboration
is a type of working together within the current neophilia that plays well
in this goal-oriented thrust for collaboration, wherein problems are solved
productively and efficiently and where “critical analyses are quickly
dismissed as grotesque blow-ups or extravagant exaggerations” and
­
deemed reactionary or obsolete (Gielen 2013, p. 53).

Problem Makers
I raise these issues in regard to the endorsement of collaboration at this
time because I do not wish to further silence art and creativity education
as modes of disruption and dissensus. My intention is not to lead us back
to the “mythically individualist quality of creativity” (Raunig et al. 2011,
p. 2), but to thwart collaboration’s narrow focus on solutions to problems
and improved product in the service of late capitalism. There is little doubt
that in light of the rise of design thinking within education, collective
­creative practice is more than copasetic with global capitalism and neolib-
eralism. Yet, collaborative processes do not just have to culminate in
   (NEOLIBERALIZED) COLLABORATIVE TURN AND ART EDUCATION    115

s­ olution-generation for economic benefit. In the critical art tradition since

the 1960s, artist collaboratives have confronted society with its own both-
ersome contradictions without necessarily delivering solutions.
I maintain that criticism within collaboration is vital to the undermin-
ing of a convivial sociality and consensual creative process that actually
limits the innovation it is supposed to be efficiently birthing. In settling
disputes toward a single solution, we accommodate one another’s con-
flicting perspectives for the sake of resolution. Instead, Adams and Owens
(2016), aligning with Mouffe’s (2013) agonism, favor the incitement of
irritation and the quelling of conflict resolution in creative collaboration
so that giving voice to opposing participants “is a sufficient goal in itself”
(p. 20) instead of something to be curbed in the name of straightforward
and pragmatic expediency.
Typically, when art educators engage with group work in the art class-
room, they put structures in place so that collaborative activities are ani-
mated by a convivial spirit building toward consensus while discouraging
any anti-collaborative tendencies. Often in the initial iterations of collab-
orative projects, roles such as time keeper, note taker, and so on are
assigned to ensure the process will run smoothly. I now wonder what is
lost in being well socialized and convivial. Certainly, these characteristics
are enviable in future business professional capacities, but what about the
roles associated with artists who are regularly considered purposeful
­problem makers instead of problem solvers (or just makers as in the Maker
Movement)? I have never doled out the responsibility of shit disturber,
contrarian, problem sustainer, trickster, dissenter, or loner within a
­collaborative art group project. In this way, the potency of such roles
might be gauged by a group’s efforts to suppress such activism and
disobedience.

Inodus
As Brown (2012) warns, “the most substantive casualties of neoliberalism
today are deep, independent thought” (p.  75). Group work animates
activity in a way that doesn’t really engage pause or individual reflection as
this slows down the dynamic movement associated with intra-group syn-
ergy. Gielen (2013) goes so far as to claim that “networks and teams pro-
mote conformist creativity” (p. 91).
These admonitions remind us to be cautious that collaboration doesn’t
take on the force of hegemony that obstructs depth, softens divergences,
116   N.M. KALIN

tempers intensity, keeps to the clock, and funnels activity in particular ways
against inciting radical movement. In this view, isolation or individualism
is not the problem. Instead, it is the endless “urge to connect (or fear to
disconnect), that obstructs any form of isolation” (Gielen 2013, p. 92) or
“space of digging deep, of reflexivity and ‘slowness’ or verticality” (p. 33).
The rules of teams restrict creative actions to a pre-set goal through com-
pliance. Pausing for even brief amounts of time within the group is awk-
ward and unproductive—something isn’t working. In the end, while an
extended conviviality may accompany collaboration, it is often at the cost
of diminished critical contemplation, thereby enhancing the depoliticiza-
tion of thought.
Alternatively, for Gielen (2013), creativity originates in the oscillation
of singularities between isolation and a social environment with the singu-
lar referring to “the unique idea that suddenly emerges and is fundamen-
tally different from the common sense” (p. 91). This unique idea emanates
from the idiosyncratic individual or collective taking “a good ‘wrong’ or
sideways look at things” (Gielen 2013, p. 93)—“[w]hat is important here
is that it can only emerge from moving among the communally shared
culture and being isolated from it” (p. 92).
This disconnection is described as an inodus as opposed to exodus that
involves a withdrawal followed by a violent return necessary to plug cre-
ative activity back into culture so as to change the status quo (Michelangelo
Pistoletto as cited in Gielen 2013, p. 92). If we leave the group to step
away and gain some critical distance to ruminate apart from compromise,
we might understand our commitments, processes, blind spots, and
­dynamism differently. Halting to reconsider the flow of emergence is cru-
cial to not letting the push of synergy take hold as hegemony.
I realize this appears to extend support for the notion of the individual,
isolated artistic genius required for artistic inspiration, but at the current
time, within our network society, this removal from the constant onslaught
of connectivist culture, it is different. We are already hyper-connected and
never truly alone (Nancy 2000), ever relating and comparing in order to
understand and define our places—we are always understanding in rela-
tion to others. I am not suggesting a permanent extraction, but short-­
term withdrawals might still enable students and educators of art space to
reconsider the ways teamwork is functioning.
This circumstance begs a restating of jagodzinski’s (2015b) question:
“What forms of collaboration as a field are we willing to support?”
(p. 294). A more critical approach to collaboration might resist the urge
   (NEOLIBERALIZED) COLLABORATIVE TURN AND ART EDUCATION    117

to compromise and, instead, sustain the contradictions, dead ends, and

unresolvables inherent in people coming together. We might be better
able to unpack the contingency of collaborative connections and not shy
away from the antagonisms of conflicting perspectives sitting side by side.
This type of divergent union “is crackling with discord, but exactly from
that, sparks of creativity may frequently fly high” (Gielen 2013, p.  67).
Whereas the compromise model, as I have been inferring, “stimulates
nothing but anticipation. It talks and meets and consults until everyone
succumbs to an appropriate mediocrity” (Gielen 2013, p. 67).

Conclusion
Neoliberal mandates such as P21 have economized terms associated with
art like collaboration for capitalist pursuits that fundamentally transform
the purposes, modes, and viability of creativity and art education. While
collaborative practice might feel like a democratic victory where all per-
spectives have value around the working table, the shift in focus on breadth
comes at the expense of depth—a depth that has served the arts and edu-
cation over the past century and more. In my critique of the neoliberal
embrace of collaboration, I am not advocating for isolated creative
geniuses, but I do feel that standing back from the herd of the current
order in a revival of the modern tradition of artistic isolation is also some-
thing we shouldn’t omit completely from conversations around creative
practices and visual arts education. Otherwise, I share the trepidations of
Gielen (2013) that we risk promoting a conformist creativity where
­individual perspectives may be contorted to network, team, or social group
(p. 91). We can’t lose sight of the importance of escaping reality to creativ-
ity or collaboration in its myriad forms.

Notes
1. The January/February 2016 issue of the Harvard Business Review titled
Collaborative Overload may serve as another indicator.
2. See Chap. 7 of this book for a more extensive discussion of creative
destruction.
3. Sahlberg (2015c) maintains that Finland stands as “a countervailing force
against the Global Education Reform Movement that is driving school sys-
tems around the world, the Finnish Way reveals that creative curricula,
autonomous teachers, courageous leadership, and high performance go
together” (p. 204).
118   N.M. KALIN

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 CHAPTER 7

Decreating Creativity Education: Yet

to Be Created

Abstract  In the concluding chapter, I contrast creative destruction that

runs capitalist economies with Agamben’s notion of decreation. I explore
how educators, artists, and activists might reanimate their roles as creatives
in this time through starving neoliberalized, entrepreneurialized, and
economized forms of creativity. Proposed are alternative modes of decre-
ation where productivity, innovation, and praxis are denied their pre-set
ends toward a state of exception that allows us to begin anew in reimaging
what creativity education might have been.

Keywords  Creativity • Neoliberalism • Creative destruction • Decreation

• Education

An argument has been made across the pages of this book that the teaching
of creativity for economic growth and renewal negates the survival of criti-
cal and political forms of creativity along with alternative artist subjectivities
in contradistinction to the artrepreneur, so synonymous with the new cre-
ative economy and the business school model taking over schooling at all
levels. I have illustrated how GERM schooling mandates and reforms such
as P21 are symptomatic of larger movements and pressures of post-Fordism
and horizontalism. Public schooling and creativity education are both on
the frontlines of implementing and sustaining neoliberal governmentality.

© The Author(s) 2018 121

N.M. Kalin, The Neoliberalization of Creativity Education,
Creativity, Education and the Arts,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71525-4_7
122   N.M. KALIN

Yet in this overwhelming push for innovation, schools and creativity are
also crucial contexts for change and societal reinvention. With all its con-
straints, stratifications, and violence, schooling nevertheless still holds dem-
ocratic potential that might be re-occupied as manifestations of commitment
to what is best for the common (De Lissovoy 2015, p. 24) and not just
market fundamentalism. Even as this book has laid out the extent of neo-
liberal ideology’s hold on society, art, education, and creativity in particu-
lar, I embrace education and creativity as sites of struggle (Britzman 2003),
always and still available as forms of dispute against the existent and the
given, as reflected by my provocations within the previous chapters. In
earlier writing (Kalin and Barney 2014b), I called for a timeout, withdrawal,
and escape from status quo art education under neoliberalism by resting in
impotentiality and rendering predetermined usages inoperable in order to
go against the grain of neoliberal logics. However, in these pages I’ve pro-
moted a reclaiming of creativity to oppose and detach creative education
from preordained, neoliberalized versions through proposals for alternative
pedagogical practices. I conclude this book by offering up a further decen-
tering of creativity away from an economics of creativity through decre-
ation and a recommitment to critical creativity.

Taking Stock
At this juncture, formal education across contexts might consider what to
retain in regard to creativity and what it might also risk resisting in the
democratization of creativity through its expansion away from arts-related
fields. P21 has acted as a recurring topic throughout this book as I inter-
rogated particular aspects of its mandate for creativity and art education.
In corralling the specific P21 mandates, I have laid out my perspectives on
this and other forms of GERM in order to illuminate the forces bearing
down on creativity education and their associated origins within neoliber-
alism. I have been tracing the conceptual transformation of creativity and
artistry, as well as their related educations in ways that align with economic
ambition while at the same time these transformations undermine and
obscure historically important understandings of creativity. All these pres-
sures seriously undermine the potentialities for critical creativity educa-
tion. In response, I have proposed that we exert diverse modes of creativity
while enlarging the myopic range of creative processes beyond neoliberal
productive iterations so that creativity in education might serve roles
yet-to-be-determined.
   DECREATING CREATIVITY EDUCATION: YET TO BE CREATED    123

As I launch into the final section of this book, in anticipation of my final

turn, I wish to briefly revisit the key points I have established thus far. I’ve
listed a set of inherent conflicts and paradoxes within art and creativity
education at this time.
–– Under neoliberal strictures, schooling is being diminished to a form
of job training as reflected by the routinized forms of standardized
testing and GERM.
–– At the same time, the global economy requires its own diminished
form of creativity as part of job training education.
–– But the routinized education forms that have proliferated in response
to economic demands do not work to provide the kinds of creativity
required by the continuing evolution of neoliberal capitalist forms.
–– What is occurring is a democratization of creativity that deceives our
abilities to apprehend and/or formulate alternatives to the current
state of affairs.
–– So, now the emphasis on creativity emerges as a discrete, instrumen-
talized skill exemplified by P21. This development is characteristic of
the current undermining of art’s exclusive sovereignty over creativity
education.
–– Educators find themselves at the juncture of all these conflicts with a
couple of ongoing and emerging problems.

• It is hard to see clearly how the neoliberal ideology of creativ-

ity pervades and crowds out older conceptions of creativity
that underpinned historical schooling regimes preceding
neoliberalism.
• Schooling’s adaptation to demands for creativity by way of acced-
ing to initiatives like P21 creates a working situation where it is
hard to pursue broader conceptions of creativity, even when edu-
cators maintain a more comprehensive vision of the meaning of
creativity in education and civic participation.

Awareness of the parameters that neoliberal mandates have in mind for

creativity education provides a starting point for dispute. If educators do
not wish to be involved “with the very form of subjectivization that acts to
ensure a quietened and market-oriented population of creatives”
(McRobbie 2016, p.  85), then they have to be able to think and push
creativity subjugated to capitalist accumulation and economic logic
124   N.M. KALIN

beyond its current fundamentalism. This then yields the subsequent set of
questions: What if we reclaimed creativity education as a pathway for radi-
cal and social democratic modes that we don’t know the value of upfront
so that education might serve the public good and not just individual
economic advancement? What if educators pushed back on the narrowed
role they are being asked to perform as suppliers of labor for post-­Fordism?
In the midst of a pervasive new orthodoxy transforming school systems so
that they adhere to a business school model, McRobbie (2016) claims
there always remains the potential for school systems to “become sites of
antagonism and tension” (p. 86).

“What Is” and “What Is Not”

What have we not yet created and for whom? By default, those of us
involved in education are creating the future. We can facilitate students’
recreating and/or uncreating of what is already occurring or has occurred
in the past. As I have been referring to in this volume, if we conceive of
schooling as a version of the “creative business school” (McRobbie 2016,
p. 187) then we limit our collective futures, but if we work to find fissures
for dissensus between “what is” and “what is not” (Biesta 2013, p. 86),
we may unlock our present, as creativity and art educators, to as yet unde-
fined and uncertain futures.
If, for example, “what is” encompasses neoliberalized forms of educa-
tion and “what is not” has yet to be created in relation to education,
teachers and students are not limited to reproduce “what is” but are also
engaged in an ongoing struggle with what might be related to the given.
To rest in the tensioned discrepancy between “what is” and “what is
not” leaves a gap open to moments of Rancièrian dissensus—“because it
introduces an incommensurable element into the existing distribution of
the sensible” (Biesta 2013, p. 83). Stated differently, while the rational-
ity of neoliberalized forms of education seem to embody a fixed and
already agreed upon common sense, when confronted with a dispute by
teacher and/or student in the moment of teaching within a specific con-
text, this rationality might be undermined, transformed, and/or rein-
vented, especially if teaching is embraced as necessarily dissensual and
antagonistic (see Kalin and Barney 2014a). This pedagogical fissure, rife
with dissensual possibility, between “what is” and “what is not” echoes
Agamben’s (2002, 1999) concept of decreation in regard to art. Before
   DECREATING CREATIVITY EDUCATION: YET TO BE CREATED    125

unpacking Agamben’s decreation, I will return to the notion of innova-

tion so that we might further unbind its intent and connection to creation
and destruction.

Creative Destruction
Innovation is often considered the application of creativity and critical
thinking skills associated with problem solving in the production and
implementation of novel and useful ideas for profit or other forms of value.
Usefulness and novelty are married in this definition to meet innovation-­
driven economic growth. Yet, usefulness and novelty are terms open to
interpretation. In relation to creativity and innovation, business embraces
usefulness and novelty as skills, largely for their disruptive and destructive
potential (Holmes 2013) related to the economy.
More precisely, Wagner (2012) identifies two essential kinds of innova-
tion: incremental innovation that significantly improves already existing
processes, services, or products; and disruptive or transformative innova-
tion that is “about creating a new or fundamentally different product or
service that disrupts existing markets and displaces formerly dominant
technologies” (p. 10). Disruptive innovation aligns with early twentieth-­
century Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter’s (1943/2003)
creative destruction, which is a fundamental principle to industrial eco-
nomics without which the sustaining of productivity, growth, and well-­
functioning economies would be greatly inhibited. This process of creative
destruction sees entrepreneurial opportunity in any economic setback or
catastrophe—times of great struggle are also times of great creativity
because we are forced to innovate in order to survive (see Florida 2005).
This “crisis-as-opportunity” (Vishmidt 2013, p. 50) embraces destruction
and the phasing out of the old with the new as required components for
economic growth, and hence, creativity is essential to innovative solution-­
development. Bauman (2001) has termed this urge for creative destruc-
tion “destructive creativity” that aims “to ‘clear the site’ in the name of
‘new and improved’ design; to ‘dismantle’, ‘cut out’, ‘phase out’, ‘down-
size’ for the sake of greater productivity or competitiveness” (pp. 103–104).
Key to creativity in this disruptive mode is that despite its name, destruc-
tive creativity tends to intensify dominant structures—such as neoliberal-
ism’s progress—through rendering something redundant and hence its
endorsement by neoliberalism itself (Harvie 2013). While in the wake of
126   N.M. KALIN

innovation for innovation’s sake, through creative destruction we may

well find economic, social, and cultural benefits, alongside these advan-
tages we also find increased levels of risk, inequality, instability, and crisis
(Harvie 2013). With the incessant destruction and sacrificing of the old
for new, more productive, efficient, and advanced inventions, current sys-
tems are perpetually either under threat of being found inefficient or
placed under the creative destruction process in their management, take-
over, or dismantling. To be clear, invention is a tool of destruction.
Likewise, as Robinson (2016) points out, “[b]eing creative is at the heart
of being human and of all cultural progress. Ironically, our powers of cre-
ativity may also be our undoing” (p. 136).
In Stiegler’s (2015) deployment of Schumpeter’s work, he maintains
that capital facilitates the destruction of knowledge when the same effi-
ciency and profit metrics used for the industrial economy are also the cri-
teria for knowledge and academic activity in free-market societies. In the
destruction of our education system, for example, this process involves the
demolition and reinvention of curriculum, policy, ownership, manage-
ment, buildings, jobs, esteem, potential, morale, concepts, or states of
mind, among other things, in the name of new and improved mandates
and reforms. These innovations are often rationalized as warranted in the
name of austerity, security, globalization, permanent improvement, teacher
ineptitude, the failure of authority of education itself, or even the creativ-
ity crisis. But as we know, there are always costs incurred in this adjust-
ment, and sometimes innovations don’t recreate. They also simply destroy
or leave debris behind.
Stiegler (2015) takes this a step further. While we are under the
imperative to invent through innovation and creativity in contemporary
times, invention is also programed for through training and education.
Stated differently, both invention and creativity are prescribed, antici-
pated, authorized, and required so that education is programming for
invention This is quite a puzzle for both innovation and creativity,
because we are planning, counting on, and programming that which is
intended to disrupt any program—a reinventing of invention, if you will
(Stiegler 2015).
Here Stiegler (2015) mobilizes Derrida’s (2007) aporia of invention
from Psyche: Inventions of the Other. This aporia “both simulates and
amplifies the imagination, and short-circuits it, that is, sterilizes it, by con-
demning it to being programmed, that is, to programming its fantasies
that are essentially unprogrammable” (Stiegler 2015, p. 201).
   DECREATING CREATIVITY EDUCATION: YET TO BE CREATED    127

Correspondingly, jagodzinski (2015) re-terms creativity under societies

of control as mere endless innovation. Among what is lost to usefulness
and profit in this conception of creativity is social and radical critique that
creative endeavors like art had previously been allowed to explore within
gallery and museum spaces supported by public funding and increasingly
operating independently at a distance from capital in “anarcho-collective
cells” (jagodzinski 2015, p.  287). Again, destructive innovation, while
creating increased profits and productivity growth, also extracts a price.

The Art of Decreation

Resuming the exploration of Agamben’s (2002) articulation of decre-
ation, any artist’s work is not simply a creation, for “at the heart of every
creative act there is an act of decreation” (p. 318). In this, he views decre-
ating as an undertaking of novelty and resistance, not repetition and com-
pliance, inherent in any creation that decreates what already exists. “Every
act of creation is also an act of thought, and an act of thought is a creative
act, because it is defined above all by its capacity to de-create the real”
(Agamben 2002, p. 318). Again, Agamben (1999) explains this notion of
decreation as “what happened and what did not happen” wherein “what
could have not been but was becomes indistinguishable from what could
have been but was not” (p. 270). In this we are not recreating the past or
the given; we are creating it anew—marking a “passage to the second cre-
ation” (Agamben 1999, p. 270) while revisiting “the possibility of what
was” (Agamben 2002, p. 316). It provides a way to redeem the given or
the past, improve upon, undo, or alter it through manifesting the poten-
tial of the actual. This “zone of undecidability between the real and the
possible” (Agamben 2002, p. 316) comes in the infinite ways of working
with the given. So, in creating we are restoring possibility to the given
through decreating an imperfect world that could always be otherwise.
Decreation might permit a reconsideration of the range of choices in
regard to alternative modes, discourse, purposes, networks, and concep-
tions that art and its education might summon in the reinterpretation of
creativity, innovation, collaboration, and critique related to art practice and
pedagogy in this era of neoliberal common sense. As Rudd and Goodson
(2017) echo in their recent volume, educators across settings should not
give into the prevailing model of the neoliberal student and feed only the
entrepreneurial subject when a myriad of possibilities for refraction of neo-
liberal common sense are still available for reinterpretation and resistance
128   N.M. KALIN

(p. 4). This mode of reconstruction might challenge and offer alternatives

to the creative destruction of art education in the name of financialization,
neoliberal policy, and market fundamentalism.
What if art education took up the teaching of creativity as a process of
decreation (Agamben 1999, pp. 270–271)? Educators wouldn’t have to
be locked into what is preplanned, nor would they have to limit creativity
to predetermined ends that are already known, such as economically ben-
eficial innovation alone. I see this opening up creativity education in three
ways. First, pedagogy itself may be reconceived and embraced as a zone of
undecidability, wherein we work with the given, such as standards, policy,
and curriculum mandates, as a basis for decreation through seeking out
teaching as a struggle and contradiction (Britzman 2003). This reimagines
creativity education as decreation wherein creativity encompasses both its
economization and the problematizing of prevailing conditions. We may
cultivate a critical creativity—where the cultivation of creativity for critical
engagement and economic innovation might exist in tension—that sets up
an alternative praxis of creativity.
Second, educators of art have a large part to play in creating the artist
subject of the future. Art educators need to ask what forms of creativity
and artist subject are escaping capture, invisible, and/or deemed irrele-
vant. In this way educators can pull from contemporary and historical art
to broaden their current limits, but they can also look to the students they
are supposedly educating. Creativity education’s borders and goals are
always reconceptualized in the idiosyncratic practices of teaching, if we are
open to listening and having our comfort zones disturbed in the process
(Kalin 2012, 2013). In leaving room in our curricula for students’ concep-
tions of artistic creativity in its myriad and yet to be established forms,
educators need to be open to the situated knowledge before them as a
basis for critical creativity that is tied to specific contexts and experiences
enabling the participation of diverse modes, perspectives, and ends.
Accordingly, educators would reconsider what creativity might mean to
local communities and students as the basis for creative endeavor, so that
one doesn’t know in advance where their efforts might end up.
Correspondingly, in an embrace of critical creativity and decreation, art
educators need to leave the door open and be on the lookout within their
learning communities for the artist subject as problem maker and not just
problem solver.
Third, educators and students can work together against neoliberal
schooling through re-occupying creativity beyond its takeover by business
   DECREATING CREATIVITY EDUCATION: YET TO BE CREATED    129

that aims to structure its limits and possibilities. Decreation requires

­resistance, radical critique without immediate resolution, reinvention, and
the audacity for change beyond economic benefit. In schooling, educators
and students need to work the edges of teaching and learning the already
known as acts of restoring possibility to the given in its myriad forms. The
exploration of emergent and critical forms related to creativity needs to be
nurtured in both students and educators so that our common sense can be
challenged on an ongoing basis.

Yet to Be Created
This volume hasn’t ventured into pure critique of the circumstances we
find ourselves in—we need to move beyond simply arguing against neolib-
eralism’s colonization of creativity education or risk resting in the nostal-
gia of creativity before its current economization. That stated, I haven’t
watered down my sustained argument with a pragmatic blindness of spe-
cific solutions. Instead, I have suggested many points of departure readers
might take in regard to transforming art and creativity education, articu-
lating my belief that a critical and creative inventiveness would contribute
to reimaging our collective futures in more democratic and just ways. In
this quest, neoliberalism provides numerous paradoxes and exploitations
that can serve as nodes to think and act critically and creatively through
embodying the logic of struggle in the act of educating. While teaching
within these contradictions, educators can be both knowingly complicit
and unsuspectingly coerced into participating in goals, such as those asso-
ciated with market fundamentalism, they may not agree with whenever
they teach. Educators need to regain or occupy teaching as a critical, cre-
ative, ethical, political, and agonistic act so that we might reclaim school-
ing in order to “begin to create a path beyond the given” (De Lissovoy
2015, p. 172). Embracing teaching, creativity, and curriculum as necessar-
ily rife with contradiction and resistances, we might move in relation to
both power and the unknown in more empowering ways for society, both
globally and locally.
This appeal facilitates the question: Are there any possibilities remaining
for an autonomy of creativity? Teachers, like creativity and art, have less
and less autonomy. Reconceiving of art education as decreation invites a
potential freedom and fear of the unknown, along with the trepidation that
might come with the loss of control inherent in not being sure of the paths
and ends of learning in advance. It is risky business, but there is a lot on the
130   N.M. KALIN

line in the neoliberalizing of education. The public that education aims to

serve needs to seriously consider the implications of schooling that empha-
sizes private and personal interests over public interests (Saltman 2014
p. 20). While GERM has coalesced nations around common national edu-
cational mandates with the aim of performing well on standardized tests
and being competitive economically, educational research and practice pri-
orities increasingly display a tendency to overlook the sociological and
global contexts of power in their efforts, making it difficult to appreciate
how these priorities are perpetuating and enhancing governmentality. Alas,
schooling represents a crucial location for struggles against governmental-
ity as it is on the frontlines of creating our future priorities in the minds
that it educates. I think at its heart, creativity education offers alternative
ways to be, think, feel, value, speak, act, and embody society beyond its
current limits, fundamentalisms, and fixations. This makes it both danger-
ous and valuable to neoliberalism. But I believe we have the obligation to
not only inspire our students to be brave in their reimaginings and decreat-
ing; we also need to leave a space for those youth who have yet to imprint
themselves on the future so that society can be reshaped through their own
acts of restorative possibility. How might change occur unless we embrace
a critical creativity education that nurtures alternative thinking and creat-
ing in a full range of its cynical, political, inoperative, and radical forms?
As I complete this book during the week of August 12, 2017, I am
struck by the power of art in relation to society. This particular week in the
United States we’ve witnessed renewed attention to the symbolic and
actual violence associated with Confederate monuments honoring Civil
War-era figures while the rise of white nationalism and President Donald
Trump’s reaction to a rally in Charlottesville Va. have inspired three prom-
inent magazine covers (the Economist [August 17, 2017, Jon Berkeley’s
cover illustration], Time [August 17 2017, Edel Rodriguez’s cover illus-
tration], and the New Yorker [August 28, 2017, David Plunkert’s cover
illustration]) whose jarring depictions of these circumstances are starkly
but provocatively illustrated. Art here holds powerful symbolism that has
spurred protest and incitements in ways that serve as a poignant reminder
of how market fundamentalism must not be allowed to take over all aspects
of society, especially not our critical and creative capacities so they might
coalesce in art and speak back to society, over and over again. Perhaps
especially in difficult times, I maintain that there is still great value to art
and creativity beyond the entrepreneurial, de-disciplined, pragmatic group
think in the service of economic innovation alone.
   DECREATING CREATIVITY EDUCATION: YET TO BE CREATED    131

Throughout this book, I’ve laid out a number of neoliberal deceits

inherent in P21 and other GERM mandates as disempowering to the
potential of the human subject. My analysis of the economization of cre-
ativity within art education focused on these neoliberal deceits and how
terms such as critical thinking and collaboration might be reclaimed for
alternative uses. We need to work the ruins as a horizon of freedom always
underlies domination despite negation by those in power (De Lissovoy
2015, p. 167), where creativity can facilitate the freedom to dynamically
express our agency as beings. We need to work against neoliberalism and
the limits it places on creativity. Decreativity, critical creativity, and radical
critique have been offered as ways into dissensus, antagonism, struggle,
and restorative possibility with creativity through art education. I call on
educators, artists, students, and activists to sustain and/or reanimate their
roles as creatives in this time through starving neoliberalized, entrepre-
neurialized, and economized forms of creativity. Let us embrace alterna-
tive modes of decreation where productivity, innovation, and praxis are
denied their pre-set ends toward a state of exception that allows us to
begin anew in reimaging what creativity education might have been.

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 Index

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS C

4Cs, 14, 106–108 China, 60
Citizenship education, 14
Civic literacy, 81–98
A Civics, 12
Agamben, G., 15, 124 Class crits, 62
Agonism, 115 Collaboration, 5
Amateurism, 62 Collaborative creativity, 110
Antagonism, 15 Collaborative turn, 101–117
Aporia, 126 Colonization, 15
Art criticism, 63 Common core, 106
Artivism, 94 Common sense, 14, 62
Artrepreneurs, 13 Commonsense order, 88
Austere pedagogy, 9 Conformist creativity, 115
Autonomy, 15, 73 Connectivist culture, 116
Autonomy of creativity, 129 Consensus, 94
Constructive collaboration, 114
Constructive critique, 70
B Contemporary art, 12
Being with, 103 Contingent, 96
Best practices, 69 Convivial, 115
Business, 3 Creative business school, 124
Business bias, 62 Creative capital, 59
Business school, 12 Creative capitalism, 93
Business school model, 121 Creative destruction, 105, 125

© The Author(s) 2018 133

N.M. Kalin, The Neoliberalization of Creativity Education,
Creativity, Education and the Arts,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71525-4
134   INDEX

Creative economy, 52n2, 121 Economy, 2

Creative entrepreneurs, 29 Education, 2
Creative industries, 14, 44 Educational authoritarianism, 61
Creatives, 15 Efficiency, 114
Creative turn in capitalism, 8 Emancipation, 89
Creativism, 32, 37n10, 93 Employment, 2
Creativity, 2, 94 Entrepreneurial literacy, 21
Crisis of criticism, 62–64 Entrepreneurial self, 25–27
Crisis-as-opportunity, 125 Entrepreneurialism, 2
Critical creativity, 11, 13, 15, 122 Equality of intelligences, 14
Critical thinking skills, 13 Event of disobedience, 96
Criticality, 13 Experiment, 111
Criticism, 13 Expertise, 14
Curriculum, 126

F
D Finland, 86
Decentralization, 42, 45 Finnish National Board of Education,
Decentralized, 14 86, 89
Decreation, 15, 122 Finnish National Curriculum
Democracy-to-come, 90 Framework, 14
Democratic and high creativity, 10 Flexibility, 30
Democratization, 62 Flexploitation, 46
Depoliticization, 85 Fordism, 42
Depoliticized, 88 Free-market, 126
Design thinking, 114
Destructive creativity, 125
Discipline-based creativity, 109 G
Dismeasure, 73, 81–98 Genius artist, 103
Disruptive or transformative Global Education Reform Movement
innovation, 125 (GERM), 4
Dissensual, 66, 72 Governmentality, 2
Dissensus, 15, 84 Governmentalization of education,
DIY, 67 48
Do-it-yourself, 111 Group think, 112
Domestication of the citizen, 85

H
E Hatred of democracy, 14
Economics of creativity, 122 Homo economicus, 23, 82
Economization, 8 Homo politicus, 82

Horizontal, 14
Horizontalism, 14
I
Ignorant citizens, 89–91
Imagination, 59
Immaterial, 42
Immaterial labor, 13
Incremental innovation, 125
Individualization, 9
Innovation, 2, 5, 59, 94
Innovative creativity, 109
Inodus, 115–117
Interdisciplinary, 14
Interpassive civics, 81–98
Investment, 24–25
J Post-studio practices, 14
Japan, 61
K Problem solving, 13
Knowledge-based economy, 24
K-12 schooling, 21
L 60
Learning to learn, 50
M
Map for the Arts, 42
Market fundamentalism, 15
Minority democracy, 91–95
N Relative autonomy, 34, 94
Neoliberalism, 1
Neoliberalized collaborative, 15
Network, 14
 INDEX 
   135
O
Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development
(OECD), 76n2
P
Paradoxes, 12
Partnership for 21st Century Skills
(P21), 3
Performative, 69
Phenomenon-based teaching, 106
Police order, 14, 87
Political economy, 12
Politics, 12, 88
Post-Fordist, 2
Post-industrial capitalism, 13
Post-industrialization, 45
Post-political, 14
Pragmatic blindness, 13
Precarity, 13, 46
Problem makers, 114–115
Productivist ideology, 13, 64–66
Productivity, 43
Programme for International
Student Assessment (PISA), 4,
Project work, 113–114
Project-based labor, 113
Public education, 2
R
Radical critique, 13, 66, 67
Rancière, Jacques, 14
Refraction, 127
Responsibilization, 27, 51
Restorative possibility, 131
Risk taking, 107
136   INDEX

S Thatcher, 26
Schooling, 2 There Is No Alternative (TINA), 1,
Self-government, 49 94
Self-precarization, 46 Turn, 15
Singapore, 60
Social critique, 47
South Korea, 60 U
Standardized, 106 United Kingdom, 26
Status quo, 15 United States, 21
Struggle, 12
Subjectification, 14, 89
Subjectivities, 14 V
Subversive creativity, 94 Vertical, 14
Verticality, 63
Visual arts education, 2
T Vocationalized, 11
Taiwan, 61
Teaching and Learning International
Survey (TALIS), 107 W
Terror of creativity, 93 World Economic Forum, 60