Dear Educators: What Are We Really Preparing Students For?
#CreativeFreedomAct #CultureShiftAct #CreativeSocietyAct
Dear Educators: What Are We Really Preparing Students For?
A Call to Convert Schools into Studios, Conservatories, and Theaters for a Post-Work Society
Let’s be honest: much of our current education system is a museum of the industrial age.
The bells, the rows, the segmented periods, the standardized tests—it’s all designed for one purpose:
to produce obedient laborers for a machine that no longer needs them.
We are still preparing children to be cogs in an economic system that is vanishing.
Post-Capitalism Isn’t Coming. It’s Here.
Automation, AI, algorithmic decision-making, and corporate consolidation have already reshaped the world. The old social contract—go to school, get a job, earn a wage, retire with dignity—has broken down.
The jobs we’re training students for are:
being outsourced
being automated
or being revealed as spiritually and socially bankrupt
In short: we are educating for irrelevance.
So the question becomes:
If schools are no longer factories to produce laborers, what should they be?
Schools Must Become Incubators of Creativity, Culture, and Consciousness
Imagine this:
Every school functions like a studio, a conservatory, a laboratory for meaning-making.
Students learn math through architecture and design, science through land art and movement, history through theater and oral storytelling, language through poetry and songwriting.
The school becomes not a place of passive reception, but of active creation—where the world is not just studied but reshaped.
We don't need more test scores.
We need more visionaries.
More storytellers, culture-bearers, community healers, symbol-makers.
The humanities are not electives in this model.
They are core curriculum—because they are how humans make sense of life.
Reclaiming the Stage of Learning
Every classroom becomes a stage, a ritual space, a creative commons.
Teachers become mentors, guides, fellow travelers—not deliverers of content.
Students become apprentices in self-expression and shared meaning, not data points on a chart.
Schools become cultural centers for their communities, not testing centers for centralized mandates.
Imagine a generation of young people trained not just to obey, but to perceive…
…to connect, to compose, to speak truth in many forms.
They won’t be “job-ready”—
They’ll be world-ready.
What Educational Leaders Can Do Right Now
1. Reframe the Mission
Stop preparing students for a job market that’s dissolving. Start preparing them to shape culture, care for each other, and design new ways of living.
2. Redesign the Day
Restructure school time around immersive, integrative projects—where art, science, language, and history merge in real-world expression.
3. Fund the Arts as Core Infrastructure
No more token electives. Every school needs full-time artists-in-residence, makerspaces, performance halls, and materials for making.
4. Build Creative Partnerships
Link schools with local theaters, galleries, collectives, farms, dance troupes, and community groups. Make learning a lived thing.
5. Honor the Teachers Who Are Already Doing This
They're often buried under bureaucracy. Give them space, recognition, and the green light to transform the paradigm.
The Goal Is Not Employment. It Is Emplacement.
Not “How do we get kids to succeed in the economy?”
But: “How do we help them take root in the world as awake, alive, compassionate beings?”
That’s what a creative society needs:
People who know how to imagine, compose, collaborate, listen, make beauty, and make meaning.
And those are things that are best learned in studios, not factories.
A Closing Note
This is not about abandoning rigor. It’s about redefining rigor—as the courage to imagine, to risk, to express, and to relate in a world on fire with change.
If we begin now—if we transform schools into centers of creative emergence—we will raise not a generation of test-takers, but a generation of world-makers.
What greater legacy could an educator ask for?
—C.T.
Call to Action:
If you're a principal, superintendent, teacher, or policymaker ready to help transform your school into a creativity incubator, reply or comment below.
Let’s create a network of Creative Society schools.
Let’s turn education into what it was always meant to be:
A sacred rehearsal for being fully human.
Proposal: Transforming Schools into Creative Society Incubators
A Vision for Post-Industrial Education Rooted in the Arts, Humanities, and Human Flourishing
Prepared by:
C.T. (Artist, Author, Advocate for the Creative Society)
Submitted to:
School Boards, Superintendents, and Educational Policy Leaders
Date: [Insert Date]
I. Executive Summary
This proposal recommends a bold but pragmatic shift in public education: transforming traditional schools into Creative Society Incubators—institutions designed to prepare students not for obsolete industrial-era labor markets, but for a rapidly emerging post-work, post-automation society.
This transformation centers on reframing education around the arts, humanities, creativity, and community-based expression as core infrastructure, rather than supplementary enrichment.
II. Background and Rationale
The Problem:
Our current school system was largely designed during the industrial era to produce workers for a labor-based economy.
AI and automation are replacing a wide swath of jobs, including white-collar professions.
Educational outcomes tied to testing, standardized metrics, and workforce pipelines are increasingly disconnected from future realities.
The Opportunity:
We stand at a crossroads where education can become the engine of cultural renewal, preparing students not just for survival, but for meaning-making, collaboration, and civic imagination.
By reorganizing schools around the studio, the conservatory, and the cultural commons, we can prepare a new generation to be:
Visionaries
Storytellers
Builders of community and care
Lifelong learners and makers
III. Core Proposal: Redesigning Schools as Creative Society Incubators
Vision:
Schools will no longer be prep-centers for labor; they will become living laboratories of creativity and culture.
Key Elements:
Arts and Humanities as Core Curriculum
No longer electives or enrichment, these are the foundation of how students engage all other subjects.
Math taught through music composition, physics through sculpture, history through theater, civics through oral storytelling.
Studio-Based Learning Environments
Classrooms redesigned as interdisciplinary studios where real projects unfold across subjects.
Emphasis on process, experimentation, and collaboration over test-based outcomes.
Full-Time Creative Faculty
Hiring and sustaining artists-in-residence, writers, musicians, designers, and culture workers as part of the educational ecosystem.
Professional creatives co-teach alongside academic faculty.
Community Integration
Schools serve as cultural hubs: hosting performances, exhibitions, open studios, and intergenerational workshops.
Students work with local artists, elders, farmers, artisans, and activists on real-world problems and visions.
Portfolio Over Testing
Assessment shifts toward creative portfolios, public showcases, reflective journals, and group critiques.
Every student graduates with a body of work that reflects their process, voice, and values.
Well-Being as a Priority
Social-emotional learning embedded into daily practice.
Rituals, silence, storytelling, and embodiment activities included alongside academics.
IV. Implementation Plan (Phase 1 – Pilot Program)
Year One Goals:
Identify 2–3 pilot schools within the district for transformation.
Assemble a steering committee of educators, artists, administrators, students, and community members.
Begin with one grade level or subject team to model the integration process.
Host workshops to retrain faculty in creative methodologies and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Launch a community arts residency program embedded in the school.
Metrics of Success:
Student engagement and attendance
Creative portfolio quality and development
Community participation in public events
Teacher retention and morale
Student reflections on meaning, identity, and purpose
V. Budget and Funding Pathways
Funding can be pursued through:
State innovation grants and federal creative learning initiatives
Philanthropic and foundation support (e.g., NEA, Mellon Foundation)
Local arts councils and community partnerships
Reallocation of enrichment program budgets into core staffing
A more detailed line-item budget can be developed with district stakeholders.
VI. Alignment with Broader Educational Goals
This proposal aligns with current district and national priorities in:
Whole-child education
Social-emotional development
Culturally responsive teaching
21st-century skills: creativity, communication, critical thinking, collaboration
Community engagement and local resilience
VII. Conclusion: A Leap Forward
We have a historic opportunity to reimagine what public education is for.
Rather than preparing children for jobs that may not exist, we can prepare them to become custodians of culture, makers of meaning, and builders of the beautiful and the just.
Let’s not wait until it’s too late.
Let’s transform education from a conveyor belt into a creative vessel—from which the next world might be born.
With respect and urgency,
C.T.
Feel free to Copy and Paste the above proposal and present to your local School Boards, Superintendents, and Educational Policy Leaders
Start with the children. Start with the arts.
Myself, I am a studio artist and a citizen. My job and my duty is to start the conversation and seed the imagination. It is up to others in the right places to nurture it into a reality. We all have a part to play. What’s your part? Do it.
Hashtags to use: #CreativeFreedomAct #CultureShiftAct #CreativeSocietyAct
web address: https://www.touchonian.com/s/creative-freedom-act
Very relevant, with Trump trying to dismantle education the timing on this is great. It really is time to do some renovation of the existing educational system. Corporations have had a handle on structuring the education system for too long, and have had a hand in shaping curriculum to meet their specific needs, rather than helping to form educational institutions that teach through immersive creative instruction, fostering a broader panacea and efficiency for learning. "Show, don't tell" is a writing technique that should also be used in general instruction to teach context for content. Using the Arts to provide limitless context in all aspects of life, metaphoric in many respects, connects understanding to subject matter; not only the how, but also the why.
Very thorough. You certainly put a lot of thought and effort into this. A new type of school that incorporates arts in learning is opening where I live. I am going to look into it further. I think its called Dream Academy. Thanks for all you do to plant seeds for a better world.