Arts-based education to develop creativity in Lithuania: insights from public policy theories

This study is a critical overview of the Lithuanian system of arts-based education, which provides conditions for the development of creativity in children and young people. The aim of the study is to provide an analysis of the ongoing transformations, changes, and tensions that are emerging in the field of an arts-based education in Lithuania. The authors analyze the particular case of arts-based education with reference to several theoretical public policy frameworks. Insights gained from the historical institutionalist approach illuminate the path dependency that favors institutionalized, centralized, elitist forms of traditional arts-based education, such as music and fine art schools. This system maintains centralized funding that allocates money from national and local authorities to long-established institutions of arts-based education. The punctuated equilibrium framework developed by Baumgartner and Jones (1993) in their book Agendas and Instability in American Politics has highlighted the reform of the national curriculum, the neoliberal education policies, the diversification of providers and services, the increased emphasis on client choice and their financial participation, administrative and fiscal decentralization with the introduction of student baskets in general, non-formal and higher education as turning points, and critical junctures that fundamentally changed the entire structure of the education system in Lithuania. Based on the multiple streams framework developed by John W. Kingdon in his book Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (originally published in 1984), the analysis revealed that the Lithuanian arts-based education system has unfortunately not gained new momentum but rather operates under the influence of general education and cultural policy decisions. The advocacy coalition framework developed by Paul A. Sabatier and Hank C. Jenkins-Smith in their book Policy Change and Learning: An Advocacy Coalition Approach revealed how heterogeneous groups of actors (i.e., students and parents, art teachers and educational administrators, and entrepreneurs in the educational market of arts-based education) participated in the process of implementing neoliberal policies, changes in educational funding, and the commodification of education.