Abstract
This chapter bears down on neoliberal ideology’s influence on contemporary conceptions of creativity and its education. Under the present 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 neoliberal governmentality that set about instilling specific values and urgencies 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 acceleration of post-Fordist economic goals for art education through government of self and others that greatly reduces the possibilities for the nurturing of creativity.
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Notes
- 1.
Kearney and Harris (2013) point out an interesting contradiction in the marrying of culture and industry as creative practitioners employ production 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 “contributing 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 economist, 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 conditions affecting U.S. artists by the Center for Cultural Innovation for National Endowment for the Arts.
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Kalin, N.M. (2018). Governmentality and Post-Fordist Art Education. In: The Neoliberalization of Creativity Education. Creativity, Education and the Arts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71525-4_3
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