Rethinking Education: Training Artists Under Global Pressure
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At SIPAM 2026, educators, policymakers and cultural professionals questioned whether arts schools should prepare students for an unstable market, protect the freedom to learn, or equip a new generation to build the cultural ecosystems that do not yet exist.
What is an arts education supposed to accomplish when the profession it leads into is increasingly precarious, fragmented and difficult to define? Should a conservatory be judged by the number of graduates who secure agents, contracts and institutional jobs, or by its ability to develop imagination, critical thought, emotional intelligence and a capacity for lifelong reinvention? And if graduates leave with refined artistic technique but no understanding of taxation, fundraising, networking or self-promotion, has the institution truly prepared them?
These questions formed the core of Rethinking Education: Training Artists Under Global Pressure, the second panel of the day at the Sibiu International Performing Arts Market (SIPAM). Moderated by Cosmin Chivu, professor at the Sands College of Performing Arts at Pace University, the panel brought together Armando Rotondi, professor at the Institute of the Arts Barcelona; Asma Manssouri, European project coordinator at the circusnext Platform; Carmen Stanciu, associate professor at UNATC "I.L. Caragiale" Bucharest; Cathy Haase, actress, author and acting educator at Pace University; Daniela Duca De Tey, curator of the Ars Electronica Animation Festival; Peter Barlow, executive director of the Sharjah Performing Arts Academy; Ina Kostelac, general manager for international relations at LADO; and Radu Szekely, honorary advisor to Romania's Ministry of Education. Together, they brought perspectives from universities, arts institutions, public policy, contemporary circus, traditional performance and media art across Europe, the United States and the Middle East.
Chivu opened the discussion by resisting the promise of a final answer. The purpose, he suggested, was to begin a conversation about nothing less than the future of the performing arts. "Education has been representing for centuries, and will remain, our structure, our base for what is going to happen in the performing arts," he said. Yet education is now operating amid rapid technological change, altered expectations and new generations whose needs institutions do not always understand.
"It is time to listen and understand what is going on and to respond maturely with everything we have to offer," Chivu argued. "Not just to give the answer, but to ask the right questions."
The first of those questions was deliberately uncomfortable: when only a minority of graduates can make a living from performance, are schools helping them or failing them? The answers revealed a deeper disagreement about the premise itself. Perhaps graduate employment is not the only meaningful measure. Perhaps the market is asking schools to solve a problem that belongs to the entire cultural sector. Or perhaps institutions are still training artists for an industry that has already changed beyond recognition.
Beyond the promise of a job
Peter Barlow, executive director of the Sharjah Performing Arts Academy, traced the employment question to the historical purpose of British drama schools. For decades, he explained, their programmes were built to feed an existing industry. Students were trained to secure representation and enter professional practice, even though only a small number ultimately managed to live exclusively from performing.
The situation in the United Arab Emirates presents the reverse challenge. "What are we training the students for? Why are we doing performing arts in a country where there is very little professional performing arts?" Barlow asked. His answer shifted the discussion from joining an industry to constructing one: "It is because they become the ecosystem. The performing arts, the creative industries, are not buildings or structures or administration or bureaucracy. It is the people who are in it."
Students therefore need more than the skills required to audition for existing roles. They need the creative and organisational capacity to generate a professional environment around them. Yet Barlow argued that one of the essential abilities needed for that work is now under pressure.
"The world is losing its ability to imagine, and students are losing their ability to imagine," he said. "They come to us with heads full of technology and information and instant access to information. Imagining something that perhaps does not actually exist at the moment is becoming more and more alien."
For Barlow, imagination and creativity must remain at the centre of arts programmes, even if that means challenging the frameworks used to evaluate them. "I would like to get rid of all outcomes-based frameworks," he said, questioning league tables and rankings tied to graduates' subsequent careers. "Our responsibility in an institution is to ensure that students get the best possible training and education whilst they are there."
The lives of graduates may take many directions. Barlow has seen former drama students become psychologists, lawyers, doctors and politicians, using abilities developed through performance training in fields that conventional employment statistics might not recognise. Schools can provide the foundation, he suggested, but they cannot control every factor shaping a life after graduation.
Radu Szekely, honorary advisor to Romania's Ministry of Education, developed this critique through the distinction between education and employability. Over the past two decades, he argued, European systems have moved away from the Enlightenment ideal of lifelong learning for its own sake towards a neoliberal model centred on making students "market-ready."
"Market-ready means that when you finish, you get employed, and your level of employability is reflected in the evaluation of the school," Szekely said. "No one asks a graduate of philosophy if he is working as a professional philosopher afterwards. For some reason, arts education has been associated with vocational and professional training rather than career and personal development."
This metric also fails to capture how artistic knowledge circulates outside established institutions. A graduate using theatre to engage a disadvantaged community is still applying professional skills, Szekely noted, even if that work never appears in statistics based on employment in a state or national theatre.
"Universities are not suppliers for current employers," he said. "They should be for future employers. But we do not know what those future employers are." Policy, in his view, must do more than respond to present conditions. It must attempt to anticipate what society will need, while giving students a greater role in designing the curricula that shape them.
The missing literacy of the cultural ecosystem
If employment cannot be the sole measure of success, students still need to understand the material conditions of artistic work. Armando Rotondi, professor at the Institute of the Arts Barcelona, prepared for the panel by interviewing his students and asking them to criticise their own institution. Their answer was strikingly consistent: they felt artistically prepared but practically unprepared to enter the profession.
"They talk a lot about taxation," Rotondi said. "'We want to know about taxes. Why do we not know about taxes?'" The challenge is not simply to add another course to an already crowded curriculum. Such subjects can appear remote from a student's artistic dream in the first year, but by the end of the programme it may already be too late.
"They need instruments, and the instruments are not only creative and artistic instruments, but practical instruments," Rotondi said. Schools should prepare students not only to find jobs, but to create their own opportunities, becoming authors of work rather than remaining exclusively interpreters of it.
Asma Manssouri, European project coordinator at the circusnext Platform, described this missing knowledge as "ecosystem literacy": the ability to understand networks, fundraising, project development and self-promotion. Circusnext operates in the transitional space between graduation and professional practice, working with emerging contemporary circus artists and a network of 25 partners in 16 countries. From that vantage point, Manssouri sees artists carrying responsibilities that were previously distributed among specialised cultural workers.
"All of this is now put on the shoulders of the schools and the artists themselves," she said. "But I believe it is a sector responsibility. It is not just the schools." Project development and leadership once belonged more clearly to producers and other trained professionals. Today, artists educated primarily as creators are increasingly expected to perform those roles too.
The response, Manssouri argued, must include continued public funding for arts education, stronger European cooperation, capacity-building and access to professional networks. Mentorship also matters. Peer-to-professional programmes connecting generations can help emerging artists navigate the transition into the field without asking formal education to carry the entire burden.
Just as importantly, the sector needs better ways to recognise a career. "A career is a patchwork of things," Manssouri said. Artists undertake laboratories and workshops, conduct research, teach and develop projects across long periods. Success cannot be reduced to the number of productions created and subsequently toured. Research time should be understood as working time, and artistic development should be measured over a horizon longer than the first five years after graduation.
Dogma, individuality and the changing classroom
The panel repeatedly returned to the danger of rigid training models. Rotondi warned that artistic tools can harden into dogma, reducing the flexibility they were supposed to create. "Sometimes, rather than opening them to creativity, we make them less flexible in understanding the world," he said. The problem is intensified when educators remain isolated inside academic institutions and lose contact with contemporary professional practice.
Even the language used to categorise artists can reproduce hierarchy. Rotondi objected to the phrase "young artist," asking whether youth referred to age or career stage. In many contexts, he said, the label becomes diminishing; "emerging" or "early-career" may more accurately describe professional position without reducing artistic maturity.
Cathy Haase, actress, author and acting educator at Pace University, brought the debate over dogma into the acting studio. She rejected the idea that "the Method" is a single fixed system. "There is only the organic creative process, which is individual to each person," she said. "If you lose sight of that, you are already in trouble, because there is no room to see the person in front of you and realise that perhaps this particular thing does not work for them."
Teaching must therefore evolve with each student. At the same time, Haase described a classroom increasingly shaped by institutional rules, health disclosures and formal complaints. Her examples pointed to a difficult boundary: how can an acting teacher approach emotionally demanding material and personal experience while respecting students' limits and institutional safeguards?
"Our work is very emotional," Haase said. "The students are terrified of emotion. There is a very real problem." She stressed that she learns from the new generation and recognises the excitement of its difference, but argued that the conditions of teaching have changed what educators are able to ask and explore in the room.
The financial structure of American higher education adds another layer of expectation. When students pay extremely high tuition, Haase observed, some arrive believing they have purchased not only education but a career. "They have to understand it is a process," she said. "It is a personal process for each and every individual, and it is their responsibility to take that process and make something out of it, not the institution."
Barlow made a similar distinction through a different metaphor: "We are not the problem-solvers. We are the launch pad." Institutions are responsible for strong foundations, but students must eventually determine how and where they take off.
Building education around lives, not only degrees
Carmen Stanciu, associate professor at UNATC "I.L. Caragiale" Bucharest, broadened the question from what is taught to whom education remains available. She spoke about her work developing study programmes in Romania and elsewhere in Europe, including new programmes in circus arts, acting and theatre and technology. Her ambition is to create master's programmes for people over 35, a group still poorly served by an educational market organised around conventional student ages.
That ambition reflects a wider need to see artistic education as lifelong. Ina Kostelac, general manager for international relations at Croatia's LADO Ensemble, described the responsibility from inside a 77-year-old public institution dedicated to traditional music, song and dance. LADO must attract artists to tradition, keep them creatively fulfilled once they secure institutional employment and prepare them for life beyond the stage.
The ensemble has deliberately developed projects outside its familiar territory, combining traditional vocal practice with jazz, electronic music, theatre, new technologies and holograms. Artists may initially resist leaving their comfort zone, Kostelac said, but participation often grows once they experience the creative development such projects offer.
Her most pressing question concerned the later stages of an artistic life. In Croatia, dancers at the institution retire at 50. "What happens when the lights go down and when the applause is finished?" she asked. "What happens to their lives and their careers, and how can we educate them during their lifetime in an institution?" Lifelong learning could help artists develop new roles as educators, mentors and workshop leaders, retaining knowledge that might otherwise disappear when a performing career ends.
Stanciu also warned that universities will soon encounter students formed by profoundly different technological and physical environments. By 2028, she suggested, European universities will receive the first fully digital generation, and institutions are not yet prepared for the shift in habits, health, perception and attention that this may bring.
Her proposed change was philosophical. "I do not think the student is a container who can be filled up with branded ideas, methods, success stories and so on," she said. Education cannot be the projection of teachers' or parents' ambitions onto another person. Yet students also need the intellectual and imaginative resources from which artistic creation grows. Stanciu's deliberately concrete prescription was to read more and write by hand every day, "because nothing comes out of nothing." Artists must fill themselves with stories in order to tell their own.
Romania brings theatre into general education
One of the panel's most significant policy announcements concerned the place of theatre before university. Szekely explained that, following several years of advocacy by the Arte Consortium of Romanian arts universities, theatre education has been institutionalised within general education. Beginning with the 2026-2027 school year, secondary students will have compulsory theatre courses.
The objective is not professional actor training. Instead, Szekely described theatre as a way to develop civic competencies, work with emotions and learn how to respond to others. In an era in which many children grow up without siblings and develop much of their social life through school and digital environments, theatre can offer structured practice in interaction, attention and empathy.
AI, originality and the search for an artistic voice
Daniela Duca De Tey, curator of the Ars Electronica Animation Festival, approached technological change from the field of media art, where experimentation with new tools has long been part of artistic practice. She noted that submissions continue to increase, from both established artists and recent graduates, suggesting that the profession has not lost its appeal. At the same time, the use of AI tools in animation has risen sharply during the past three years.
Artists will use these technologies whether or not institutions teach them, Duca De Tey argued. The educational responsibility is therefore not simply technical instruction. "It is very important that art education helps them use these tools in a very critical way, in a reflexive way," she said. AI must become a subject of conversation across disciplines, not only within media art.
The deeper challenge is originality. When images, styles and aesthetics can be generated and replicated with extraordinary ease, students must reconsider what an artistic voice means. "It is not about the tools," Duca De Tey said. "It is about how you use the tools, how you find your voice and how you ask the right questions that have a broader relevance for society." Arts education must help students identify what remains uniquely valuable in human creativity and what cannot be replaced by machines.
This concern connected directly with Barlow's defence of imagination. Technology can provide instant access to existing information and endless stylistic possibilities, but an arts school must still create the conditions in which a student can imagine what is absent, uncertain or not yet marketable.
From useful learning to beautiful learning
In the panel's final round, Chivu asked each participant to identify one thing that could no longer be postponed. The answers formed a compact agenda for change.
For Kostelac, the intolerable condition was indifference. "Young generations need to develop critical thought and react, and I think art plays a key role in that," she said. Training should not produce technically skilled artists who remain unable to feel, express emotion or respond to everyday life.
For Manssouri, the key was cooperation: between countries, disciplines, sectors and generations. It also meant changing the metrics through which artistic success is read, recognising the multiple forms of work that constitute a sustainable creative life.
For Haase and Barlow, expectations must be recalibrated. Education can provide rigorous training and a powerful point of departure, but it cannot guarantee a career or assume responsibility for every subsequent decision. For Stanciu, students must be treated as people rather than containers, while recovering the habits of reading, writing and accumulating stories.
Rotondi closed with a defence of knowledge that does not need to justify itself through immediate industrial outcomes. He recalled how the language of "useful learning" can lead institutions to eliminate humanities programmes because their value is not directly connected to an industry. Arts education, he proposed, must also make room for "beautiful learning."
"Sometimes learning is beautiful as it is," Rotondi said. Students should not fear knowledge that exceeds immediate experience or professional utility. They should read beyond theatre and return to literature because "reading a novel is, first of all, an education in feelings." The book, he suggested, is becoming an object of fear in schools and universities precisely when sustained attention and emotional imagination are most necessary.
What remained was less a solution than a shared sense of urgency. Arts schools cannot promise graduates a career, especially in a field changing faster than curricula can follow. But they can offer space to experiment, fail, think critically and understand the realities of working life. Perhaps that is the most honest preparation: helping artists remain curious, adaptable and able to imagine a future of their own.
