What Does It Mean to Educate Human Beings in the Twenty-First Century?
Austin Kleon didn't write a book about education—but he may have written one of the most important books educators can read this year.
In recent years, many school districts have developed Portraits of a Learner, Graduate Profiles, or similar frameworks intended to articulate what success should look like beyond test scores. Although these initiatives differ from place to place, they often emphasize many of the same human capacities: creativity, collaboration, communication, curiosity, adaptability, ethical judgment, and the ability to continue learning long after formal schooling ends.
The aspirations are worthwhile. They acknowledge something educators have always understood, even when our systems have not reflected it particularly well: the purpose of education cannot be reduced to the efficient transfer of academic content. Knowledge matters, but education is also concerned with the formation of people. We are not merely trying to produce students who can answer questions correctly. We are trying to help young people become the kinds of human beings who can make wise decisions, participate in communities, solve unfamiliar problems, create meaningful work, and contribute something of value to the world around them.
The difficulty is that our daily practices do not always match those ambitions.
Schools may celebrate creativity while rewarding compliance. We may speak enthusiastically about collaboration while asking students to complete most of their consequential work alone. We claim to value curiosity, but the questions that determine a course's direction are often selected before students enter the room. We tell young people that their ideas matter, then ask them to produce work that will be read by one person, assigned a number or letter, and quietly buried in a learning management system.
This is not an accusation against teachers. Most teachers are working within crowded curricula, rigid schedules, accountability pressures, inherited grading practices, and systems that were not designed with authentic contribution as their primary purpose. It is, however, a contradiction worth confronting. We say that we want students to become creators, collaborators, and problem-solvers, while much of school continues to position them as consumers of information and performers of predetermined tasks.
That contradiction was on my mind as I read Austin Kleon’s Don’t Call It Art.
At first glance, the book seems like an unlikely source of insight about education. Kleon writes about artists, writers, musicians, creative practice, and the ways people learn to make things together. He does not offer a school-improvement framework. He does not provide a list of instructional strategies or a rubric for evaluating student engagement. Yet as I read, I found myself filling the margins with references to John Dewey, Seymour Papert, Lawrence Lessig, Eric Raymond, Etienne Wenger, George Siemens, and Jal Mehta, as well as questions related to my own research on authentic, student-centered learning.
The more I read, the less I believed I was reading a book about art.
I was reading a book about how human beings learn.
We become through participation
One of the ideas running through Kleon’s work is that people discover who they are by doing the work. Creative identity is not something fully formed in advance, waiting to be expressed once the necessary confidence, expertise, or permission has been acquired. It develops through making, sharing, borrowing, revising, observing others, and participating in a community of practice.
That idea challenges one of the assumptions embedded in much of schooling: that students should first acquire sufficient knowledge and skills, and only then be invited to do something authentic with them.
The sequence usually looks something like this: explanation, practice, assessment, and perhaps, if time remains, application. Students learn the vocabulary before joining the conversation. They master the basics before engaging in deeper work. They demonstrate readiness before being trusted with meaningful responsibility.
There is certainly a place for direct instruction, guided practice, foundational knowledge, and carefully sequenced support. The problem arises when preparation becomes a permanent condition. Students can spend years preparing to write without publishing, preparing to conduct research without contributing to a real inquiry, preparing to participate in civic life without exercising meaningful civic agency, or preparing to create without ever producing work that matters beyond the grade attached to it.
Kleon’s perspective suggests a different possibility: perhaps participation is not merely the reward for learning. Perhaps participation is one of the primary ways learning occurs.
Every reader of fantasy understands this intuitively. Frodo does not develop courage by attending a seminar on resilience before leaving the Shire. Luke Skywalker does not become a Jedi by completing a packet on the Force. Miles Morales does not become Spider-Man by memorizing a list of heroic dispositions. Their identities emerge through action, apprenticeship, failure, responsibility, and participation in struggles larger than themselves.
The heroes of our stories rarely feel ready when the work begins. Readiness is produced by the work.
Schools cannot and should not manufacture perilous quests for students, but the underlying pattern matters. Human beings often become capable by being invited into meaningful activity before they possess complete mastery. The apprentice enters the workshop not because the apprenticeship is finished, but because that is where the apprenticeship happens.
This is close to what Seymour Papert argued through constructionism: people develop powerful knowledge when they are actively engaged in making things that are meaningful to them and visible to others. The public artifact matters because it gives thought a form that can be examined, questioned, improved, and shared. The learner is not merely receiving knowledge. The learner is participating in its construction.
Etienne Wenger’s work on communities of practice makes a related point. Learning is not simply the internal acquisition of information; it is also a process of becoming a participant in a community. A person learns what it means to be a historian, programmer, musician, scientist, teacher, or craftsperson by entering the practices, language, responsibilities, and relationships of that community.
Identity and competence develop together.
If our schools genuinely want students to become creative and capable contributors, then students need more than assignments designed to simulate contribution. They need opportunities to participate in the real intellectual and civic work of the world.
Knowledge has never grown in isolation
Kleon’s writing also resists the mythology of isolated genius. Creative work emerges from a network of influences, conversations, borrowings, adaptations, and responses. Artists learn from other artists. Writers answer other writers. Musicians inherit traditions, alter them, combine them, and return something new to the culture.
This makes some people uncomfortable because schools often teach a simplified version of what originality is. We warn students against copying, insist on individual production, and sometimes treat influence as contamination. Proper attribution is essential, of course, and students must learn to distinguish ethical borrowing from plagiarism. But originality has never meant creating in a vacuum.
Lawrence Lessig’s work on remix culture helps clarify the distinction. Culture grows because people inherit materials from the past and use them to make something new. Language itself is borrowed. Genres are borrowed. Methods are borrowed. The stories we tell are filled with ancient patterns wearing modern clothing. Shakespeare borrowed. Tolkien borrowed. Hip-hop samples. Scientists build on prior discoveries. Scholars place existing ideas into new relationships.
The ethical question is not whether we borrow. We cannot avoid borrowing. The better questions concern how we acknowledge our sources, what we transform, what value we add, and whether our use contributes to or merely exploits the commons from which it came.
This has obvious implications for education. Instead of asking students to perform originality by concealing influence, we could teach them to trace intellectual lineages, compare interpretations, remix responsibly, synthesize across disciplines, and explain what they changed and why. Those are more sophisticated intellectual practices than pretending every idea emerged fully formed from one mind.
Eric Raymond’s distinction between the cathedral and the bazaar offers another useful connection. In The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Raymond contrasts closed, centrally controlled software development with the visible, iterative, distributed work associated with open-source communities. In the bazaar model, many people inspect problems, propose changes, identify errors, and contribute improvements. The strength of the system comes not from the perfection of any individual contributor, but from the collective intelligence of the network.
Many classrooms still resemble cathedrals. Knowledge is designed elsewhere, delivered through approved channels, and protected by a hierarchy in which the teacher is expected to know what students do not. Student work is completed privately and inspected by the authority at the front of the room.
Authentic learning often resembles a bazaar. Ideas circulate. Drafts remain visible. Students learn from one another’s partial understandings. Problems become shared objects of inquiry. Expertise is distributed rather than monopolized. The teacher remains important, but the teacher is no longer the only person capable of making a meaningful contribution.
This does not mean abandoning expertise or replacing instruction with educational chaos. Open-source communities do not reject expertise. They depend upon it. They simply allow expertise to be exercised through participation, critique, documentation, mentorship, and contribution rather than guarded as a scarce possession.
The same could be true in schools.
The classroom as studio, workshop, and commons
One of the most productive metaphors for authentic learning is the studio.
A studio contains finished work, but it also contains sketches, false starts, scraps, revisions, experiments, tools, models, and evidence of thinking in motion. It is a place where people observe one another, borrow techniques, receive critique, and develop judgment through practice.
A studio does not treat mistakes as irrelevant, but neither does it pretend that every mistake is equally valuable. Errors become useful when examined. Revision is not punishment for getting something wrong; it is part of the work itself.
The same is true of workshops, laboratories, newsrooms, rehearsal spaces, kitchens, and software repositories. These environments are organized around the production of something meaningful. Knowledge is used in pursuit of a purpose. Feedback has consequences. Quality matters because the work is going somewhere.
Too much student work goes nowhere.
A student may spend hours writing an essay that will be seen only by the teacher and forgotten once the grade is entered. Another may create a presentation delivered to classmates who are simultaneously polishing their own presentations and waiting for their turn. A group may build an elaborate project that imitates professional practice but addresses no real audience, problem, or community need.
The work may be engaging. It may even demonstrate learning. But authenticity is not created by adding craft supplies, technology, or group roles to an otherwise closed assignment.
Authenticity begins when students participate in work that has meaning beyond its compliance function.
A history class might create a local archive that preserves oral histories from community members. Science students might collect environmental data that contributes to a public conversation. Mathematics students might analyze transportation, housing, or budget data and present recommendations to an authentic audience. English students might publish essays, produce documentaries, or develop resources that help others understand an issue. Computer science students might create tools that solve small but genuine problems inside the school.
None of these examples is automatically authentic. A public product can still be superficial, and a traditional assignment can involve profound thinking. The deeper question is whether students are being invited into the practices of a discipline and whether their work carries meaning for someone beyond the grading transaction.
The shift is not from worksheets to projects. It is from simulation to participation.
Technology should create room for more humanity
This question becomes more urgent as artificial intelligence changes the conditions under which students encounter information and produce work.
For generations, schools operated in a world where access to information was limited. Teachers, textbooks, libraries, and universities served as essential gateways. The ability to remember, retrieve, organize, and reproduce information carried tremendous value because information itself was difficult to obtain.
That scarcity has been eroding for decades. Search engines placed vast amounts of information within reach. Smartphones made access nearly constant. Generative AI now goes further by summarizing texts, explaining concepts, drafting prose, generating examples, translating languages, writing code, and producing competent responses to many of the tasks schools have traditionally assigned.
This does not make knowledge irrelevant. Students cannot exercise judgment about ideas they do not understand. They cannot recognize falsehood without sufficient background knowledge. They cannot ask sophisticated questions from a position of complete ignorance. Knowledge remains necessary.
But knowledge is no longer sufficient.
One of the reasons I have always loved Star Trek is that its technologies are usually not the point of the story. Warp drive, transporters, universal translators, and replicators remove barriers that once consumed enormous human effort. The result is not a universe in which human activity becomes meaningless. The technology creates room for more interesting human questions: How should people govern themselves? What does justice demand? How do communities respond to difference? What obligations accompany power? What does it mean to explore without becoming a conqueror?
The replicator provides an especially useful metaphor. It can produce food quickly and efficiently, making hunger and food scarcity largely irrelevant aboard a starship. Yet in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Captain Christopher Pike still cooks for his officers.
From a narrow efficiency perspective, Pike’s choice makes little sense. The replicator is faster. It requires less labor. It can presumably produce almost anything his guests might request.
But Pike is not cooking because the crew needs calories.
He is practicing hospitality.
He is creating a space for conversation, trust, service, fellowship, and belonging. The value of the meal does not reside solely in the food. It resides in the relationships formed around the table.
The replicator can produce dinner. It cannot replace the human act of making dinner for someone.
Artificial intelligence may become the educational equivalent of the replicator. It can already produce summaries, examples, explanations, outlines, lesson plans, and first drafts. The immediate institutional response has often been defensive: protect the assignment, detect the machine, preserve the old labor.
That response is understandable, but it risks confusing the task with the purpose.
If a machine can perform an educational activity adequately, we should ask what human purpose that activity was supposed to serve. Was the purpose to produce five paragraphs, or to develop an argument? Was it to retrieve information, or to exercise judgment about evidence? Was it to generate a presentation, or to communicate something meaningful to an audience? Was it to complete the work independently, or to develop a voice capable of contributing to a conversation?
Technology does not necessarily reduce the importance of human beings. It reveals which parts of the work were never uniquely human in the first place.
The arrival of AI should not lead us to make education more mechanical in an attempt to defeat the machines. It should force us to make education more human.
That means giving students more opportunities to ask worthwhile questions, make judgments under conditions of uncertainty, collaborate across differences, create beauty, serve others, develop ethical commitments, and contribute to communities. It means recognizing that efficiency is not the highest good in education, any more than it is at Pike’s dinner table.
Some things matter precisely because a human being chose to do them for another human being.
What kinds of people are our classrooms helping students become?
This brings us back to the Portraits of a Learner and Graduate Profiles appearing in many school systems.
The competencies named in those frameworks are often treated as outcomes to be measured at the end of schooling. Creativity, communication, collaboration, citizenship, and agency become qualities graduates should possess when they cross the stage.
But people do not become contributors by learning about contribution. They become contributors by contributing.
They do not develop agency in environments where every meaningful decision is made for them. They do not become collaborators by dividing a teacher-created task into four isolated parts. They do not become ethical users of technology by being prevented from using it until graduation. They do not become creative thinkers by waiting until they have mastered everything adults believe they need to know.
The qualities we claim to value must become features of the learning environment itself.
Students should have genuine choices whose consequences they can examine. They should create work for audiences capable of responding. They should participate in communities where expertise is distributed and where helping another person learn is recognized as evidence of one’s own growth. They should encounter problems that cannot be solved by locating the correct answer in a textbook. They should revise their work because they want it to improve, not simply because the rubric requires another draft.
This is where instructional coaching and school leadership become crucial. Teachers cannot simply be told to make learning more authentic while the surrounding structures reward coverage, standardization, and compliance. If we want different classroom experiences, we need to examine pacing expectations, grading practices, schedules, professional learning, access to community partnerships, and the ways schools define evidence of success.
The shift toward authentic learning is not primarily about adopting a new instructional strategy. It is a change in the role students are permitted to play.
Are they recipients of a system adults have constructed for them, or are they participants in the intellectual and communal life of the school?
Are they completing tasks, or joining practices?
Are they being prepared to contribute someday, or are they contributing now?
Austin Kleon does not answer those questions for educators. That is not what his book sets out to do. What he offers is a vision of creative life rooted in participation, community, influence, experimentation, and contribution. When that vision enters into conversation with educational theory and classroom practice, it exposes the poverty of any model of schooling that treats learning as passive acquisition.
It also reminds us that creativity is not an ornamental addition to the serious work of education.
Creativity is part of how human beings become capable of doing serious work.
Education as human formation
The twenty-first century has not made the old purposes of education irrelevant. Young people still need knowledge. They still need intellectual discipline, historical understanding, mathematical reasoning, scientific literacy, careful reading, and the ability to express themselves clearly.
What has changed is the environment in which those capacities must be exercised.
Students are entering a world saturated with information, shaped by algorithms, and increasingly populated by machines capable of producing plausible answers. In that world, the ability to repeat information will matter less than the ability to interpret it. The ability to complete familiar tasks will matter less than the ability to recognize unfamiliar problems. The possession of a credential will matter less than the capacity to continue learning, adapting, creating, and contributing.
The goal of education, then, cannot be merely to make students more efficient at the work machines are learning to perform.
The goal must be the formation of human beings who can use powerful tools without surrendering judgment, who can participate in communities without losing individuality, who can inherit culture without becoming trapped by it, and who can create something new without pretending they created it alone.
That is an ambitious task, but education has always been ambitious when understood at its best.
It asks us to help young people discern truth, create beauty, build community, solve worthwhile problems, and recognize that their lives are connected to the lives of others. It asks us to preserve knowledge while also making room for transformation. It asks us to prepare students for a future we cannot predict without reducing them to future workers in an economy we do not control.
Most importantly, it asks us to treat students not as incomplete adults waiting for real life to begin, but as human beings already capable of meaningful participation.
Perhaps the central question for twenty-first-century education is not simply, “What should students know?”
Knowledge matters, and it always will. But knowledge has never been the final purpose of education.
A better question may be, “What kind of people are our classrooms helping students become?”
Are they becoming people who wait for permission, or people who recognize responsibility?
Are they becoming people who consume what others create, or people who add something of their own?
Are they becoming people who see learning as a requirement imposed upon them, or people who understand learning as one of the ways they participate fully in the world?
If we want graduates who are creative, collaborative, curious, ethical, and capable of contribution, those qualities cannot remain promises printed on posters or listed in strategic plans. They must be practiced in the ordinary life of school.
Students should not spend twelve years preparing to become writers, scientists, artists, historians, programmers, leaders, and citizens.
They should spend twelve years becoming them.
Education is not merely preparation for contribution.
At its best, education is contribution itself.
Continue the Conversation
This essay grew out of my reading of Austin Kleon’s Don’t Call It Art and the connections I found among his work, educational research, open-source culture, instructional coaching, and authentic learning.
I gathered those connections into Field Notes No. 001, a free companion created specifically for educators. It includes five ideas educators can take from the book, connections to thinkers such as Dewey, Papert, Lessig, Raymond, Wenger, and Mehta, questions for reflection, and a curated reading guide for continuing the conversation.
Download your free copy of Field Notes No. 001: Don’t Call It Art here
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