By Mark Selkrig
How “Creative” Language Has Colonised Cultural Policy, While Arts Education Slips Further Into Crisis: What The Next Cultural Policy Must Do
Australia’s next cultural policy is being developed right now. The consultation is open. This is the moment to ask: has the rise of “creative industries” language actually undermined arts education? This distinction matters urgently.
What The Current Cultural Policy ‘Revive’ Said It Would Do And What Has Happened.
In 2023, the Australian government released Revive: a place for every story, a story for every place. It celebrated the arts as “central to Australia’s future” and committed $2.6 million to specialist in-school arts education programs. It stated that “the pathway to a career in the cultural and creative sector begins with arts education.” This sounded like commitment. But look closer at the language, and a different picture emerges. Whilst Revive was being celebrated, creative arts enrolments have collapsed. Research by Gattenhof and Saunders document the crisis, such as enrolments in Year 12 arts subjects have declined by 21 per cent nationally,at university level, creative arts enrolments have declined significantly. with numerous university degrees closed. Revive did not cause this crisis. But it failed to acknowledge it. It celebrated arts whilst ignoring or attending to structural barriers related to arts education that government policy had created.
A cultural policy that ignores education policy is not a cultural policy. It is a press release.
The Language Shift: From “Arts” to “Creative”
There has been a shift in language itself over the last decade or so, for example, The Australia Council for the Arts became Creative Australia. Arts Victoria became Creative Victoria. Across government, “arts” has been systematically replaced with “creative.” This is not semantic. It is ideological.
When you rename departments and institutions, you signal that arts are no longer about disciplines—dance, drama, music, visual arts—but about a generic quality called “creativity” that can be extracted, measured, and deployed across the economy.
This matters because it enables the separation of arts education from arts policy. Education ministers and arts ministers no longer speak the same language. As researcher Dan Harris has noted, there is a fundamental tension between Jason Clare (Education) and Tony Burke (Arts)—they are not aligned on what arts education means or how it should be funded. When “arts” becomes “creative,” this misalignment becomes invisible. It becomes possible to celebrate “creativity” in cultural policy whilst defunding arts education in education policy.
How Revive Reframes Arts Education as Workforce Development
Revive uses the phrase “creative industries” 47 times. It uses “arts education” only 12 times. When arts education is mentioned, it is almost always in the context of “career pathways” or “workforce development.” Notice: “career choices in the arts”—not “education in the arts.” This reveals a fundamental shift. Revive frames arts education as instrumental—a means to develop creative workers. Not as intrinsic—valuable in itself. Arts education becomes a pipeline, not a public good. It becomes workforce development, not human development.
When we treat arts education as workforce development, we reduce it to economic terms. We lose the spiritual and existential dimensions that make arts education valuable in itself. A narrow focus on material needs—on jobs and economic return—ignores the dimension of spiritual freedom, a radical existential freedom that is essential to human flourishing.
Why Creative Industries and Arts Education Are Not the Same Thing
When you treat arts as “creative industries,” you ask different questions than when you treat arts as “education.” A creative industries approach asks: How do we develop the creative economy? How do we support creative workers? What’s the return on investment? An arts education approach asks: How do we teach young people to think creatively? How do we develop artistic disciplines? What’s the intrinsic value of arts in human development?
A creative industries approach is market driven. It expects sectors to be self-funding. It focuses on skills extraction. Then it demands immediate return on investment. An arts education approach treats arts as a public good. It requires public investment. It focuses on discipline-based learning. And it understands that building cultural capacity takes time.
These frameworks are incompatible. Justin O’Connor argues, culture and the arts need a renewed social contract, it must be repositioned from economy to the public realm of care, commons and service provision. This is exactly what arts education requires. It must be treated as a public good—a foundational part of democratic citizenship—not as a sector to be developed for economic return.
Revive uses arts education language but deploys it in service of creative industries logic. This allows policymakers to claim they support arts education whilst implementing policies that undermine it. This is a policy contradiction enabled by language colonisation.
The Uncomfortable Truth: Slippage and Impoverishment
There is a significant concern in the slippage of terms. The gradual shift from “arts” to “creative industries.” The slow replacement of “arts education” with “workforce development.”
This slippage is not accidental. “Creative industries” language sounds progressive. But in the process, we lose something essential: the idea that arts education is a public good. That it has intrinsic value. That young people have a right to learn artistic disciplines.
As argued in a previous blog, current trends in learning—with an emphasis on testing, measurement, and “21st century skills”—have led to impoverished approaches to arts education. When arts become “creative skills” to be extracted and measured, the depth and rigour of artistic discipline is lost. Arts education becomes about developing generic competencies rather than teaching young people to think, create, and express themselves through specific artistic forms.
When you stop noticing this slippage, you end up with a cultural policy that celebrates the creative economy whilst arts education is diminished. This is what happened with Revive, and if we’re not careful, it will happen again with Revive 2.0.
What Revive 2.0 Must Do Differently
This is the moment to make a choice: will we repeat the mistakes of Revive 1.0, or will we finally acknowledge the tension between creative industries and arts education?
Most importantly, Revive 2.0 must treat arts as education, not industry. This means public investment. This means a coherent national approach to arts education. And this means ensuring that education ministers and arts ministers are aligned. It also means recognising that you cannot have a thriving creative sector without a functioning arts education system.
But it also means being vigilant about language. It means noticing when “arts education” slips into “workforce development.” It means resisting the colonisation of arts education language by creative industries logic. And it means asking: are we talking about arts as a public good, or arts as a sector to develop?
Revive 2.0 is being developed now, the consultation is open, until the 24th May and offers a chance to address a gap and make some careful choices or distinctions. Because the language we use will shape the policies implemented, which will determine whether young Australians have access to arts education, or whether we continue celebrating the creative economy whilst arts education collapses.
Mark Selkrig is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne. His research and scholarly work focus on the changing nature of educators’ work, their identities and lived experiences of these events. He has been the recipient of awards for publications in this field and acknowledged for his leadership, outstanding work and advocacy for arts development and education. Mark is on LinkedIn.
This article was originally published on EduResearch Matters. Read the original article.
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