We have been teaching children to perform, not to think.

A provocation for art education, and for everyone who claims to care about the future of young people

There is a post circulating right now on LinkedIn that typifies everything that is wrong with how art education is understood, discussed, and defended. It asks, with genuine sincerity: “Am I teaching children to draw — or teaching them to think like artists?” And then it offers realism and stylisation as the two equal paths towards that second, more noble goal.

I do not doubt the care behind it, but care is not the same as clarity, and this particular confusion has cost us decades.

Learning to draw accurately is not the same as being creative. These are not two points on the same spectrum. They are not even the same kind of thing.

Replication is a technical skill. It trains the eye and the hand to reproduce what already exists. It requires patience, observation, discipline. All valuable, all teachable, and entirely separable from the capacity to bring something new into being.

Creativity is a cognitive and perceptual process. It is about questioning what you see, disrupting what you expect, and making decisions in the complete absence of a correct answer. A student can become technically brilliant, producing work of extraordinary accuracy and refinement, and never develop an original thought. We have all seen it and continue to see it produced at scale.

Consider one of the most common “creative” tasks in art classrooms worldwide: students select several images, arrange them on a single surface, and render the whole thing in painstaking detail. It is presented as creative thinking. And there is a moment in the choosing and the composing where something like genuine decision-making occurs. But that moment is measured in minutes and what follows is measured in weeks. The creativity happened before the art did. What the student actually spends their time doing is replication, and we call it creative inquiry because we cannot quite bring ourselves to call it what it is.

Yet, classrooms keep prioritising “getting it right” whilst claiming to nurture independent thinkers. The realism is assessed, the stylisation is praised for its “personality”, and the inner life of the young person – what they actually think, feel, and wonder about – is gestured towards and then sidestepped.

The ego problem nobody wants to name

There is a particular kind of art teacher (and I say this with thirty years of experience in this field) who has built an identity around the technical mastery of their students. They post the portfolios, they celebrate the realism, and they parade a full cohort of technically accomplished work as evidence of their own excellence.

Yes, the students are good, genuinely skilled, and sometimes extraordinary in their rendering. But if you sit with those students and ask them what their work is asking of them, what they are actually trying to understand through the making, listen carefully to what comes back, because if the answer is as polished and rehearsed as the work itself, that tells you something.

A student in genuine inquiry is uncertain, searching, sometimes frustrated; not because the technique is eluding them, but because the work itself is not yet resolved. They do not know where it is going. That not-knowing is not a problem to be solved. It is the work. The moment a student knows exactly what the finished piece will look like, the inner life closes. What remains is execution; weeks, sometimes months, of careful, skilful rendering in service of an outcome that was decided before the making truly began. The student is no longer inside a question. They are waiting, for completion, for approval, for the teacher to confirm what they already suspected: that they did it correctly.

That is not creative inquiry. That is compliance with extra steps.

The most dangerous art teacher is the one who confuses their students’ skill with their own insight.

I have worked with students from age two to twenty. I have taught in schools where art is treated as a break from “real” learning, and in institutions where it carries genuine academic weight. In thirty years I have never once found that technical proficiency, on its own, produces a young person who knows how to be with their own not-knowing. That capacity has to be cultivated differently.

What we trained them to do, AI can now do better

There is an uncomfortable truth that sits underneath all of this. For generations, art education has been training students to do exactly what artificial intelligence can now do faster, cheaper, and with more consistency than any human hand: to observe, replicate, and produce aesthetically competent outputs according to established visual conventions.

If the goal of art education is technical reproduction, we have already lost the argument. The tools exist. They are extraordinary, and they have no inner life, no capacity for genuine inquiry, no need to understand what the work is asking of them.

Which means the question is not “how do we teach better replication?” The question is: what can a human being do that a generative model fundamentally cannot? And the answer, if you sit with it long enough, is this: a human being can be changed by the process of making. A student in genuine creative inquiry does not just produce an image. She produces herself, differently.

That is what art education is for. Not the image. The person.

Emerging Inner Worlds: Early Encounters with the Image
Artwork created by my Grade 3 students, 2012.

What creativity actually is, and how it can be taught

Creativity is not a talent and it is not a personality type. It is not the possession of people who naturally “think differently.” It is a capacity, and like all capacities, it can be developed, or it can be atrophied through years of being asked only to perform.

In my classroom, the work begins not with technique but with perception, and not always with something physically present. Sometimes it begins with asking a student to imagine their way inside another artist’s experience. Not to respond to the painting, but to what the artist must have seen, felt, and needed to say. Hokusai did not paint a diagram of a wave. He painted what it means to be small in the presence of something vast and indifferent. When I asked my Grade 8 students to respond to that, not one of them produced a wave that looked like his. They produced their own encounters with force, with fear, with water as they had known it. Imaginary, remembered, entirely personal, and you could feel that in every piece.

The teacher whose post prompted this piece genuinely believes she is teaching creative thinking. Her great dilemma, as she presents it, is whether to encourage realism or stylisation – as if the most important question in a young person’s creative development is which aesthetic mode they prefer. Both approaches are valid and both require skill, she says. And there it is. Still talking about how things look and still measuring by outcome.

What she is actually doing is asking every student to copy Picasso’s cockerel, and then reframing the ones who couldn’t do it accurately as having made a stylistic choice. The child who struggled with proportion becomes the bold expressionist. The one who couldn’t render the detail becomes the instinctive abstractionist. Perceived incompetence dressed up as creative freedom, and the tragedy is that she means well, but meaning well is not the same as understanding what you are doing.

Picasso’s cockerel was never about the bird. It was defiance. Survival. A particular human response to a particular moment in history. That cannot be copied; it can only be re-encountered. Nothing of that encounter was in the classroom. The experience had been removed and only the image remained.

This teacher is not an exception. She is representative of a system that has trained art teachers to equate outcomes with understanding, to mistake variation for originality, and to believe that if students are engaged and producing work that looks successful, creativity must be present. But it isn’t, and until we are willing to name that clearly, we will keep sending students out of art classrooms having never been taught what creativity actually is.

That is the difference I am talking about.

That discomfort is exactly where the work begins.

Listening Before Knowing: The Early Creative Psyche
Artwork created by my Grade 3 students, 2012.

Over time, and this is what I have witnessed across thirty years, in students from two to twenty, when young people are given permission to not-know, and supported in staying with their inquiry rather than rushing towards resolution, something shifts. They stop asking “is this right?” and start asking “what is this becoming?” They begin to notice what they actually think, as distinct from what they have been told to think. They develop what I can only describe as a relationship with their own perceptual intelligence.

This is not mystical. It is methodological, and it requires a particular kind of teaching – one that holds the space for inquiry rather than directing it towards a predetermined outcome. Jung called this process individuation. The educator Gert Biesta calls it subjectification. What I know from inside the practice is that it looks like a student who spent three weeks making work that “didn’t work,” arriving one morning with something that is unmistakably theirs.

I have seen students develop discernment, self-awareness, the capacity to collaborate from a genuine rather than a performative place, all through a sustained encounter with materials, questions, and their own responses to both.

These are not soft skills. Daniel Priestley, writing about what the next generation of workers will actually need, names exactly these capacities: discernment, creativity, the ability to collaborate – not as a social lubricant but as a genuine cognitive practice. These are the skills that cannot be automated, and they are precisely what gets squeezed out of education systems that measure what is measurable and call it quality.

The Collective Image: Co-Creation in the Emerging Psyche
Artwork created by my Grade 5 students, 2012.

The institutions that should know better

The International Baccalaureate has, in many ways, tried to take arts education seriously. The Visual Arts course asks students to develop genuine inquiry, to situate their practice contextually, to reflect on their own development as makers and thinkers. I have spent years working within that framework, and I believe in its potential.

But Group 6 – the arts – is not compulsory. In a programme that positions itself as developing internationally minded, whole people capable of navigating a complex world, the arts remain optional. An add-on. A nice-to-have for students who are that way inclined.

This is not a minor administrative detail. It is a statement about what a human education is for, and right now, the statement is: analytical thinking and technical knowledge are the foundation. Everything else, including the capacity to perceive, create, and know yourself through making, is supplementary.

This is wrong, and it will become more obviously wrong the further we move into a world where the analytical and technical can be largely outsourced to machines.

Governments and education systems worldwide face the same reckoning, and most are nowhere near ready for it. The path-dependency is real – you cannot easily dismantle an assessment infrastructure built over decades, staffed by people whose identities are built around it, and replace it with something that values what has never been measured. The ego investment in the current system is enormous. Acknowledging that it has gotten something this fundamental wrong would require a kind of institutional humility that is genuinely rare.

But the students sitting in classrooms right now do not have the luxury of waiting for institutions to catch up. They need teachers who understand – not because they were told, but because they have lived it – that the most important thing art education can offer is not a skill. It is an encounter with themselves.

Technique in Service of Thought
Artwork created by my Grade 9 student. Here, technique is not the outcome. It is the language through which thought becomes visible.

I am not arguing against teaching drawing. I am not arguing against technique. Technique, in service of genuine inquiry, is extraordinary: it is the difference between having something to say and having the means to say it fully. What I am arguing against is the confusion that has allowed technique to stand in for the whole enterprise.

We are not producing images. We are producing people. And the way we teach art is either developing their capacity to think, perceive, and respond, or it is teaching them to perform for the approval of whoever is watching.

The fact that so many art teachers cannot yet tell the difference is not an individual failure. It is a systemic one. But it is one we can no longer afford to leave unaddressed.

This is the argument I have been making for thirty years, and I am not finished making it.