Campaign 2020: Arts and Cultural Education is a Fundamental, Civil, and Human Right

The Campaign for a Creative Generation is a global campaign working to ensure that the next generation reaches their full potential to solve society’s greatest challenges. With intergenerational leaders from around the world, the Campaign is dedicated to inspiring, connecting, and amplifying the work of individuals and organizations committed to cultivating the creative capacities of young people. 

In 2020, the campaign theme will be…

Arts & Cultural Education is a Fundamental, Civil, and Human Right

This year will focus on amplifying the stories of individuals, organizations, research, and resources enabling this vision.

A New Frontier

We are experiencing a new kind of revolution in our time. This revolution is not centered solely in politics, technology, or the increasing globalization of our planet—but rather, it features the voices of the next generation, centered in the discourses of all elements of our collective, global future.

For generations, young artists and creatives have been at the center of policy debates in town councils and community gatherings through the long-standing work of community-based programs which are fueled by artists, educators, and community leaders. More recently, international media has amplified voices such as those of Greta Thunberg, the inspiration for the “Fridays for Future” movement, and of the young people who led a “March for Our Lives” on Washington, D.C. about gun violence in the United States. Both are examples of youth artists and creatives operating at the intersection of arts and culture, learning, and activism.

At Creative Generation, we have been particularly interested in the practice and verbiage of social activism through the arts. For the past six months, we have studied the question of how arts education organizations articulate and implement their goals. In May 2019, we conducted a literature review and held a focus group with 15 national leaders in the field of arts and cultural education in the U.S. We found that ever since the late 1980s, the data regularly cited about the benefits of the arts and culture has fallen largely into the category of “instrumental,” or utilitarian, value—meaning benefits that are not about the value of the arts themselves, but are about using the arts to achieve some extrinsic purpose, like achieving higher grades. Most of the organizations we studied emphasize the following advantages of arts education: lower dropout rates, higher academic achievement, raised standardized test scores, and higher college graduation rates.

Changing the Narrative

Our focus group also discovered that our field has been trained to show how arts and culture helps to develop other skills or capacities in order to appeal to the perceived gatekeepers of funding, resources and policy. It was also revealed that the way most programs frame their work is not how they actually implement their work.

Using antiquated language is problematic: educational psychology research tells us that how we describe our work impacts the fidelity of how we implement that work. When we justify our programming through antiquated talking points, we run the very real risk of implementing our work with fidelity to those antiquated talking points — not to the actual reason in our hearts.

We have started to see shifts in the global narrative for arts and cultural education, especially through events held in the latter part of 2019.  Last October, we shared our findings at the World Alliance for Arts Education conference, held in Frankfurt, Germany. Here, delegates from 49 nations crafted the Frankfurt Declaration, which stresses the urgency to reform supports for arts education in nations around the globe and implores government agencies to take action:

“[We] call for transformative action for arts education as being integral to sustaining communities and meeting the needs of all people in the face of critical global challenges…[This] Declaration celebrates the unprecedented arts performances linked to … movements led by children and young people throughout the world. It asserts arts education as a right for all towards the nurturing of a paradigm of solidarity, cooperation and good living”

Through this declaration, the parties express their desire to hold a 3rd World Congress on Arts Education, which will foster the exchange of ideas and urge policy development to close arts gaps and fully embrace a new narrative of arts education as a fundamental, civil, and human right. However, we still have work to do.

Policy is Changing, but is it Enough?

Around the globe, good work is happening to shift the narrative and implement meaningful policy change to articulate the role of arts and culture, learning, and activism in the lives of young people.  For examples, India recently made arts education compulsory for grades 1 through 12, with a mandatory minimum of two hours per week. Ireland passed similar policy in 2013, but is working its way through determining the implementation of these requirements. 

Next door, the UK remains embroiled in a years-long debate about arts education, with cultural organizations and government agencies facing off against one another. This led the Cultural Learning Alliance, which champions a right to art and culture for every child, to publish a briefing paper on arts education as a social justice issue. “If we want to live in a just society we must work together – policy makers, schools, teachers, artists and cultural organizations – to ensure that every child and young person experiences an arts education that enables them to fulfil their potential,” writes Sam Cairns, the Alliance’s Co-Director, on the Gen C Blog.

Others, like in Finland, are taking a more democratized approach.  Aleksie Volta describes, their cultural education plans,, which are comprehensive cultural programs designed for pupils, ensuring that all the children and young people get in contact with the culture institutions (theatres, music halls, museums etc.), art forms, and local cultural heritage, and are given the possibility to create their own culture and art across the country. 

In the United states, research has shown that where gaps in access to arts education do exist, they often fall along racial and socio-economic lines. This issue persists almost uniformly across all 50 states. In 2012, Obama-era then-Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, highlighted this finding in remarks about the need for future education policy reform:

“For a host of reasons, high-quality arts education is absolutely critical to providing all students with a world-class education….Unfortunately, the arts opportunity gap is widest for children in high-poverty schools. This is absolutely an equity issue and a civil rights issue.”

Shortly after, in 2015, the Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, serving as the nation’s federal education law. The arts hold a prominent place among the “well rounded subjects” which must be taught to every child in the country. However, the law also democratized control of the implementation and monitoring of education to the states and local districts, thus creating more steps for arts and cultural education advocates to hold the government accountable to delivering on this promise. 

Delivering on International Doctrine

For almost two decades, advocates have been framing in new ways since the UNESCO adoption of the 2006 Lisbon Roadmap for Arts Education. Advocates can cite that arts education is a fundamental right by tracing the policy and international doctrine lineage to the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

Within these international doctrines, all have the right to be equal before the law and entitled to no discrimination (UDHR, Article 7), the right to education (UDHR, Article 26), and the right to freedom of expression (UDHR, Article 19). Additionally, children specifically have the right to education (CRC, Article 28), the right to participate freely in cultural life and the arts (CRC, Article 31), the right to form his or her own views, and the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child (CRC, Article 12).

Further, for those member states ratifying the CRC agree to “respect and promote the right of the child to participate fully in cultural and artistic life and shall encourage the provision of appropriate and equal opportunities for cultural, artistic, recreational and leisure activity.”

Even with these doctrines in place, we have failed to adjust our national policies, implement existing policies with fidelity, or envision the bold social changes needed to reframe the argument for arts and cultural education as a right to young people.

What Can We Do in 2020?

Thus, we have chosen this as the 2020 theme for the Campaign for a Creative Generation: Arts & Cultural Education is a Fundamental, Civil, and Human Right. We will work to amplify the voices and  the stories of individuals, organizations, research, and resources who are working in their own communities and countries enabling this vision.

Over the course of the year, we will publish inspirational stories and new research on the Gen C blog, roll out the publication of numerous white papers from the Gen C Institute, work with a cohort of programs around the globe in the Gen C Incubator, and pilot a new curriculum through the Gen C Academy.

This will be a busy year at Creative Generation and we hope that you will be a part of it. How can you employ this campaign in your community? What steps will you take towards achieving this bold vision? Let’s get to work.