For a Permanent Cultural Transformation

Faced with budget cuts in arts education, cultural actors appeal to those in power. This posture of supplication reveals, in my view, a dead end. It is time to think differently about our action.

The political choice to miseducate

Professional theater actors recently sounded the alarm about declining funding for theatrical activities in schools. Jean-Gabriel Carasso, in an op-ed published by Éditions de l’Attribut (« Théâtre et éducation : Sisyphe est mon cousin ! », December 2025), laments that methods that have proven their educational effectiveness are regularly called into question, forcing the sector to constantly remobilize to rebuild what political decisions destroy. He points out that these activities represent only modest sums compared to the overall budgets of the State and local authorities.

This observation is not new. Jean Piaget, in Psychology and Pedagogy (1969), had already formulated it forcefully. He showed that new pedagogies and research conducted over nearly a century had scientifically established which methods allow children to learn more, understand better, and emancipate themselves as individuals and citizens. Piaget emphasized that true learning happens through the child’s own activity, through their manipulation of reality and progressive construction of knowledge, not through the passive transmission of pre-established knowledge.

Yet, Piaget lamented, despite this scientific evidence, little or nothing was being done to integrate these effective pedagogical methods into the French educational system. He saw this as a deliberate political choice: poorly educated citizens would be more malleable, more easily influenced than people trained in critical thinking. The political hypocrisy was therefore complete. New pedagogy approaches, even today, remain marginalized and viewed with suspicion by the institution. As long as they remain in the minority, they don’t really disturb anyone. But they must not be allowed to prove their effectiveness too convincingly.

What is at stake with theater workshops in schools, partnerships between artists and teachers, theater options in high schools, cross-training programs, and all the mechanisms that Jean-Gabriel Carasso lists in his op-ed, is precisely this tension between an emancipatory education and an education of submission. The effects observed on students are remarkable: free expression, personal voice, group solidarity, emancipation, empathy toward others, relationships with partners and strangers. Democracy, citizenship, solidarity, poetry. Beyond theater itself, an entire pedagogy of engagement is at stake.

The inconsistency of supplication

In current mobilizations, it is systematically mentioned that the President of the Republic himself allegedly stated that theater should be a mandatory experience in middle school. People deplore that his words have had no effect, assuming that “reactionary forces” devalue these activities by judging them merely recreational or even dangerous in terms of morals. This expectation of presidential support seems to me a grave political inconsistency, and constitutes in my view a symptom that I propose we face head-on.

Why inconsistent? Because the current president embodies what Pierre Serna named in 2019 “the extreme center”: political figures elected without experience in public action, carried by electoral strategies supported by capital holders to defend their interests. This extremism of capitalism defended at the state level means that the State is no longer at the service of citizens but perverted to serve other interests. The gap between words and actions is considerable, and this gap is not accidental but structural.

Expecting this power to respect its own words is therefore a form of political naivety. It is not by supplicating those who oppress us that we will obtain satisfaction. Artists and cultural actors who appeal to the president place themselves in the position of a child asking for the assent of a father who has been lying to them from the start. This infantile posture is not equal to the democratic stakes we claim to defend through our work, nor to the level of awareness we should have thanks to our culture of works.

The dismantling of arts education programs is part of a broader movement of centralization followed by state withdrawal. When the collective pass Culture was implemented, it replaced many other local funding mechanisms, creating total dependence on national funding. This centralization then allowed the State to blow “hot and cold” on activities, up to the freezing of credits that paralyzed all projects. We should have understood from the start that this was a weakening, not an improvement, and not accepted this mechanism, or at least transgressed it to avoid becoming hostages to it.

Permanent transformation as method

So, faced with this observation, what to do and how to do it? I believe, like John Dewey, that a collective organizational system must always be rediscussed. In The Public and Its Problems (1927), he analyzes how publics are constituted in response to the consequences of collective actions. For him, democracy is never an achieved state but a continuous process of forming and reforming publics. Rules must constantly evolve, be in permanent transformation.

Dewey shows that the main problem of modern democracy lies in the identification and organization of publics themselves. A public exists when individuals are affected by the consequences of actions in which they do not directly participate, and when they become aware of this common situation. The democratic task consists in facilitating this awareness and this organization. Yet existing institutions, inherited from past contexts, can become obstacles to this organization when they become rigid.

Let us therefore not believe that there could be a system that would be “very good” once installed and that we would then need to work to perpetuate. Let us not be deceived by this illusion of stability. We must always remain in permanent transformation, in constant discussion, attentive to the changes in the world. In this way, we can anticipate trends, identify new causes to defend, construct new narratives for the generations of elected officials who arrive. We must hold our line and dialogue, not to defend and secure what we have already put in place, but to permanently rethink it and adapt it to reality, which is always changing.

This perspective implies not collaborating with hypocritical elites by begging for their benevolence, but better cooperating among actors to build antifragile logics. Antifragility, a concept developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2013), designates this remarkable property of certain systems: shocks that weaken certain parts strengthen the whole through collective learning.

Building antifragility through diversification

Concretely, on funding issues, we must gradually build funding from multiple sources for cultural activities. Faced with the centralization of the pass Culture, we should have understood that it was an attack against the territorial sovereignty of actors, and acted by voluntarily continuing to build other local funding sources. We should have defended arts and cultural education not only within schools but also outside them, because it concerns civil society as a whole. We should have taken advantage of this situation to create more links between schools and the outside, to co-construct projects with multiple funding sources.

Instead of staying within the framework and seeking funding from a single source, we needed to understand that this source was potentially weakening and, without rejecting it, associate it with others. I am not saying this is easy. But this is precisely a citizen mobilization, choices, partnerships, reflections, questions that could have been quite different depending on each territory. And this can still be done today.

Antifragility comes through several paths: accepting error as learning material, documenting failures as much as successes, multiplying small experiments rather than grand plans, building redundant networks rather than unique structures. If a project fails in a distributed system, its documentation allows others to learn. If a crisis occurs, the diversity of approaches increases the chances that a solution will emerge somewhere.

It is about rebuilding institutions in the etymological sense of the term: instituted ways of doing things together. Not in dependence on state powers that can be hijacked by policies contrary to the general interest, but in citizen and republican responsibility. If the State no longer fulfills its mission, it is our responsibility as citizens to be responsible for our collective future. The history of the world is made of institutional collapses. Faced with this, what can we rely on? On living institutions, democratically constructed, flexible, local, diversified, but connected thanks to the cooperation capacities enabled by digital tools.

Rebuilding rather than supplicating

The example of Nelson Mandela seems enlightening to me. During his twenty-seven years in prison, Mandela did not merely survive: he thought, discussed with his fellow prisoners, developed the foundations of the future South African state. As Anthony Sampson notably reports in his biography Mandela: The Authorised Biography (1999), Robben Island became a true political university where prisoners organized courses, debates, and developed collective thinking about the future of their country.

When Mandela was released from prison and became president, he refused to let himself be corrupted by the logic of revenge. He wanted to build a state of dialogue rather than confrontation. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, despite its limitations, embodied this will to rebuild the social fabric rather than reproduce inverted logics of domination. This capacity to think about reconstruction under the most difficult conditions, to refuse the easy path of sterile confrontation in order to invent other ways of doing things, this is what should inspire us.

We always have the opportunity to rebuild institutions, to rethink them, to reinvent them. We must accept that movement is permanent and that politicizing it is part of our work. Let us not pretend that we are only artists whose sole role would be to do artistic activities. Everything is political. Taking institutional action is fully part of our professional responsibility.

As Lawrence Lessig reminded us in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999), “code” in the broad sense—that is, the rules that structure our common spaces—can be collectively rewritten. This source code that we can decide to rewrite together will be the source code of the future world. But we can build it starting today. We all have complementary political capacities within us, creativity, initiatives, and this in complementarity, each contributing in their own place.

Moving beyond political childhood

Op-eds of observation, like that of Jean-Gabriel Carasso, are necessary. They allow us to name the setbacks, to document the attacks. But they are absolutely not enough. We must go further, move from observation to action. And to act is not to ask the people who oppress us to change their minds, while remaining subject to their decisions. To act is to build, rebuild, invent other ways of doing things.

Let us move beyond the infantilization to which we have largely consented in recent years. Let us take our responsibilities. Crying, supplicating, or attacking leads nowhere. The foundations we will build through these reconstructions, of which we will be the actors, will be renewed institutions that transform themselves permanently and will constitute the future bases for democratic cultural action. That is to say, action that does not depend on the goodwill of the current power that has shown and repeatedly shown its deeply hypocritical nature, but that is anchored in the shared responsibility of the citizens themselves.

Arts and cultural education deserves better than supplications addressed to those who are destroying it. It deserves that we take back control of our collective destiny, that we build the conditions for its sustainability through diversification, horizontal cooperation, and permanent transformation. This is demanding, but it is equal to what we claim to defend: emancipation through art and culture. Let us apply this emancipation already to ourselves—that will be the best possible starting point.