We’re All Creatives Now: Democratized Creativity and Education

Résumé

This article draws attention to and lays a critique against the relationship between creativity and neoliberalism within society, art, and education in order to both denaturalize and challenge its progression. I explore the following question: What might the implications be if contemporary education concerns itself with facilitating creativity for economic good at the expense of other conceptions of creativity? Here I confine myself to charting how creativity acts as a discursive term representing political, educational, artistic, economic, and social processes of our times. I maintain that creativity is profoundly transforming through processes of colonization and democratization associated with neoliberal economics and entrepreneurial innovation. In response to these changes, this article aims to re-appropriate creativity for education by pushing back against the current business bias with expanded meanings and purposes for creativity that do not align with creativity for industry alone.