While Korea, Singapore and China are recognising the need for creativity education, this elitist curriculum review would have Australia sleepwalking backwards into the 19th century, writes Michael Anderson.

The exasperated cries of "not again" you can hear around schools are coming from arts teachers infuriated at the wrongheaded analysis of the Australian Curriculum review.

After reaching a point where the arts were finally taking their place as part of core learning, the review of the Australian Curriculum not only pushes the arts but also schooling back into the 19th century.

The review begins with platitudes about the importance of the arts, then recommends that the arts be watered and dumbed down; it recommends that drama, dance and media arts be "elective subjects" with much of their content reduced or absorbed into other areas of the curriculum.

The international research clearly demonstrates that students who engage in an active, demanding, high-quality arts education are more likely to excel in their academic and non-academic lives.

As the Major Performing Arts Group argues in the review, "the benefits of a comprehensive arts education are felt across all learning areas". And if that's the case, and the research certainly suggests it is, surely an opportunity for a high quality arts curriculum should be available to all young Australians.

Cutting the arts from the Australian Curriculum is a massive false economy.

The skills and knowledge provided by all of the art forms are the foundation blocks of creativity, which is fast becoming the must-have skill of the 21st Century. The irony here is that while our international neighbours in Korea, Singapore and China increase and expand their offerings in the arts to deal with the need for creativity education, this review would have us sleepwalking backwards into schooling for the 19th century.

The section in the review on the Arts quotes at length from Dr John Vallance, principal at one of Australia's most elite private schools, Sydney Grammar School. He argues for the importance of the arts in several facets of life and education, and then undermines the provision of arts in schools by suggesting the absorption of dance, drama and media arts into other parts of the curriculum, and the retention of slimmed down content in Music and Visual Arts.

It is hard to escape the impression that the underlying assumption here is that most kids do the arts outside schools, so we shouldn't bother doing it in school time. While that may be the case in the privileged halls of Sydney Grammar School, it is simply not the case that all young people in our schools have equal access to arts education.

It is not the arts curriculum that is a "cruel hoax" on students, as Dr Vallance claims. The cruel hoax is that this review has used elite perspectives at the expense of the opportunity for young people everywhere to have access to a strong and sustained arts education. Dr Vallance's call and the recommendation of the review in the arts generally fly directly in the face of all of the prevailing evidence that the arts is a distinctive and critical set of understandings that young people will need to navigate the 21st century. This report will do nothing to strengthen that possibility.

The narrow and retrograde recommendations of the report hark back to a world that has not existed (with the exception perhaps of elite private schools) for decades. The report is no friend of the arts, artists, schools, and teachers, but most critically, it threatens high quality education for young people in our schools (and not just in the arts).

So the sighs you hear from teachers all around the country today are for yet another wrongheaded, backward-looking attack on quality arts education. This is an attack on a curriculum that has never been a perfect, but that has nevertheless recognised the unique place of the arts in the lives of young people and sought to equip them with the skills and knowledge to live in the 21st century, even young people who do not currently have access to the privilege and power that an elite education can afford.

Michael Anderson is an Associate Professor of Drama, Teaching and Learning at the University of Sydney. View his full profile here.