https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/19/business/career-graduation-jobs-gen-z.html
If a new educational intervention emerged with decades of evidence showing improvements in language development, memory, executive functioning, spatial reasoning, academic achievement and long-term confidence, schools would be rushing to implement it. Parents would be fighting to get their children enrolled. Administrators would be searching for funding. Policymakers would be asking how quickly it could be scaled.
But we already have it. It’s called performing arts education.
Decades of research have shown that sustained engagement in the performing arts, specifically music, is linked to stronger language development and memory, executive functioning, communication skills, collaboration, confidence, academic achievement, and even math scores.
That is why I was delighted to read Jodi Kantor’s excellent New York Times article, “This Is a Hard Time to Start a Career. These Two Words Can Help,” because it speaks to much of what arts educators have known for generations.
Kantor argues that young people entering the workforce are facing extraordinary uncertainty: shrinking entry-level opportunities; AI disruption; economic anxiety; and a growing sense of hopelessness about work. Her advice centers on two words: need and craft. Develop a craft. Learn how that craft serves human needs.
Across music conservatories, theater classrooms, dance studios, and rehearsal rooms, teaching artists have long understood that the discipline of learning to do something skillfully—something requiring sustained effort to master—offers benefits even to those who don’t go on to pursue the arts professionally. Arts educators will already know that training a child to become a professional artist is hardly the point.
The point of arts education is to create adaptable, aware human beings—young people who understand that mastery is not a talent you're born with, but something that requires persistence. In other words, performing arts students understand how to achieve what Kantor describes as “craft” and that knowledge can be applied to any future endeavor.
Beyond craft, Kantor also talks about “need.” Here again, arts education can tick the boxes. After all, art itself—with all its beauty, playfulness, and pathos—is a profound and deeply human need.
Teaching children the performing arts is a conduit for engaging them with these deeper, more profound questions. Regardless of whether a performing arts student goes on to become a professional, they will come away with a deeper understanding of what "need" means, why it is important, and how to follow it.
As Kantor so beautifully puts it, “Craft gives their work authority. Need gives it propulsion.”
“Craft and need.” Kantor’s recipe for the dawning of this new age of uncertainty and AI. The performing arts have been teaching them all along.
