Abstract
This chapter takes up the notion of critique in relation to creativity. I delve into the state of criticism in art education at this time playing 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.
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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 practice. This is an old claim, from the Frankfurt School, but it’s on steroids 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.
- 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 presidential 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 purposes 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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Kalin, N.M. (2018). Radical Critique’s Challenge to 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_4
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