Rewriting the future: The arts as a blueprint for education
BY: Hanneke Mackie
Hanneke Mackie is the Founder and Executive Director of Buzz Kidz and The Buzz Foundation
The future of work
If the accelerating pace of development in our own short lifetimes is anything to go by, picture the world our children are stepping into: self-driving cars, autonomous trains, buses, even planes. Machine-run farms. AI-assisted medical procedures. Robot-operated warehouses, cashier-less stores. Buildings designed and constructed without architects, engineers, or builders.
Have we engineered our own obsolescence? With entire industries disappearing, how do we ensure our children not only survive, but thrive in this future.
McKinsey estimates up to 800 million jobs could vanish by 2030. Every major future-of-work report — from WEF to the OECD — agrees: the skills job seekers and entrepreneurs will need are the ones AI can’t replicate. Creativity. Critical thinking. Collaboration.
Less creative than ever
In 1968, Dr. George Land was commissioned to develop a test for NASA to identify creative genius. The test measured divergent thinking — the ability to generate original, expansive solutions. It proved so effective that Land, and Dr. Beth Jarman, administered the same test to 1,600 children aged four to five. Astonishingly, 98% scored at the level of “creative genius.” The study continued as a longitudinal analysis. By age 10, only 30% of those same children met the threshold for creative genius. By adulthood, just 2%.
Decades later, Dr. Kyung Hee Kim found a similar trend: IQ scores rising, creativity plummeting. “We are raising smarter kids who struggle to think divergently, imagine alternatives, or create new solutions.”
Two landmark studies, decades apart, reveal the same truth: our children are being drained of creativity, just when they need it most. This may be because our children live in the future, but we educate them in the past.
Radical redesign: How do children best learn and what should education achieve?
The school system, still in place today, was designed over a century ago to produce compliant workers for an industrial economy. That economy is gone. Yet learners are still grouped by age. Subjects remain siloed. Half the class is bored, the other half is overwhelmed. Teachers walk a tightrope, trying to meet needs at both extremes. Standardised tests reward memorisation, not understanding.
The system is unfit. We teach in the opposite style to how children best learn, and we measure outcomes that bear no relevance to the skills they’ll need to thrive in the future. Perhaps the best approach lies in turning these glaring issues into fundamental guiding questions and re-designing education with the best solutions to these questions as our goal.
UNICEF, the LEGO Foundation, and decades of neuroscience confirm that children of all ages — especially those with neurodiversity — learn best through movement, play, collaboration, and full-body exploration. In high school, we refer to it as interdisciplinary, project-based learning.
So the ultimate question is: What is naturally playful, embodied, expressive, rhythmic, musical, and joyful? The arts. It can be, and should always be, a central teaching and learning tool.
Research indicates that children exposed to the arts tend to perform better across the board. Sandra Ruppert found that it leads to better grades and long-term success. Elliot Eisner argues that the arts build imagination, flexible thinking, and interpretive insight — the skills the future demands.
When we ask how children learn best and how to develop future-ready skills like creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking, the answer to both is clear: the arts.
Art is foundational
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson understands:
“In order to really succeed in math, the sciences and engineering; you have to be able to think outside of the box, creatively problem-solve. The creative thinking is in the arts. A certain amount of arts education doesn’t mean that your ambition is to grow up to be a painter — but you can use that kind of thinking and apply it to anything else: business, engineering, science, and be better at it.”
Yet somewhere along the way, schools became allergic to the arts. Perhaps the idea of more free thinkers threatens to disrupt the standardisation and conformity traditional education relies on.
Most teachers are apprehensive about improvising, attempting character, or using movement and music to aid children's learning. We’ve stopped celebrating learners’ individuality — because our own has been flattened by school bells, standards and the pressures of traditional education.
From far too young, we teach children from the neck up — desk-bound and silent. One in ten learners is medicated to meet that expectation. Perhaps this indicates a teaching issue rather than a learning disability.
The arts offer a powerful solution — enabling learning through story, movement, song, and roleplay: all offline and fully embodied. Teacher and child engaging through kinaesthetic, auditory and visual modalities, activating a spectrum of sensory and cognitive processes that deepen understanding and retention.
Creativity is the foundation of every future we want to build. It is essential to science, philosophy, mathematics, and even code. It can grow in many places. But nothing grows creativity as dynamically, as powerfully or as beautifully as the arts. And no other path strengthens it while also nurturing the qualities that make us fundamentally human: empathy, communication, and confidence.
The arts don’t just prepare us for the future.
They prepare us to live.
---
Note: This blog is part of Injini’s contributor series. The views and opinions expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Injini.
