Questioning the Role of “21st-Century Skills” in Arts Education Advocacy Discourse

Abstract

The revised Core Arts Standards offer music educators the chance to examine the contradictions that currently permeate the arts advocacy discourse. This article examines the emphasis on 21st-century workplace skills in claims made by arts advocacy proponents. An alternative approach focuses instead on lifelong learning in the arts and the array of possibilities associated with engagement in music, visual art, dance, theatre, and media arts. While the conceptual framework guiding the writing of the proposed Core Arts Standards aligns with this alternate view by connecting the philosophical foundations for artistic literacy with lifelong learning goals, advocacy claims that stress workplace skills may hinder full implementation of the standards and reduce the value of arts learning to one kind of benefit, namely, economic. In reimagining arts advocacy using an enlarged view that connects potential benefits for the learner to the habits of arts-centered inquiry itself, advocacy claims gain a sounder philosophical foundation.