The Future of Education

The position of the creative arts varies across the world’s many models of education, from “essentialism”; i.e: the arts are fundamental to Liberal Education – to “instrumentalism”; i.e.: the arts (music in particular) can help build meta- capacities that possibly improve subject-matter learning – to the “Enrichment” view that the arts are nice but dispensable to the core purposes of education.  Across most of this spectrum lies the tacit assumption that the arts - whether a lot or a little - gets “put into” “regular” academic or applied education. We offer here a reverse case, in which it is academic subject matter that gets “put into” a creative arts setting. Founded in 1973, The New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA) is one of America’s preeminent high school arts conservatories, with a renowned arts pedagogy. Students attend, tuition-free, from every socio-economic background, every type of New Orleans high school and at every level of prior academic achievement. Students attend their home schools for half of the day and NOCCA for the other half. Over ninety-five percent of NOCCA graduates go on to top colleges and conservatories, eighty percent with scholarships. In 2008 our consultancy Collective Invention began a long-range project to transform NOCCA into a full- day Arts/Academics program. We analyzed the DNA of NOCCA’s arts pedagogy, which included learning by doing in a master-apprentice model; purpose-driven creativity and inquiry; and student-centered learning. We then “transplanted” that DNA into “THE ACADEMIC STUDIO,” a completely new math, science and humanities curriculum. With the same passion for math, science and humanities as they had for music and dance, students became producers of knowledge just as they were producers of art, music and dance. Students that had lagged academically became significantly higher performers.

Keywords: Arts, Creative DNA, Redesigning, Academic Studio;