By Mara-Iarina Ene
We are the most educated generation in history, yet one of the least employable. Attending university no longer guarantees a job, although for decades, that was the point of it. As children, many of us were steered away from the things we liked and were good at, on the grounds that we would “never get a job” as a painter, or singer, or dancer. This has had a lasting negative impact on the self-esteem of many young people whose talents were not valued in school. Instead, the whole system of public education seems to have done its best to get us all admitted into university… and then abandoned us there. No wonder then that so many of us, including myself, feel stuck. Perhaps what we need now is movement, literal movement, to get unstuck.
For as long as humans have lived in societies, dance has prevailed in daily life. Its early history is mysterious; it left behind no physical artefacts, and is understood mainly through other forms of art: from pre-historic cave paintings in India, to ancient Egyptian rock carvings. Dance was used for purposes of ritual and celebration, and the ancient Greeks believed it was a gift from Gods. As recently as the early modern period, dance was integral to everyday life, transcending social class. People learned to dance from instruction manuals, studied it formally and used it as a means of socialization. Then came the industrial revolution. The education system was reshaped to meet its needs, creating a structured and standardized system which served factories, not creativity. The most important subjects were those useful for turning children into workers. All over the world, education systems adopted the same hierarchy, with mathematics, reading and writing at the top and arts at the bottom. As Sir Ken Robinson put it in his 2006 TED talk, “as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.” Curiosity has now been replaced with compliance, and we are not the better for it.
In recent decades, dance has been increasingly dismissed as an educational subject, being pushed out of the classroom and reduced to a hobby or an after-school activity. Despite being a compulsory part of the English national curriculum for ages 5 to 14, dance is often an afterthought. Its positioning between PE and the performing arts makes it vulnerable to slipping through the cracks. This is no coincidence but a structural, systemic shift. Ofsted’s 2023 PE subject report found that in just over a third of schools, dance is either not taught to all pupils, or not at all. Even more telling, as of 2022, only 1.3% of pupils in England took dance at GCSE level, making it a subject now rarer than Latin. So why do we treat dance as ‘extra’ rather than a core part of education?
Education should have a basis in diversity, not conformity, and it should give equal weight to sciences, humanities and arts. There is extensive research into the unexpected benefits of teaching controlled movement in schools. The concept of embodied cognition proposes that thinking isn’t just in the head, but it involves the whole body. Thus, we’re not just expressing our thoughts through movement, but movement can influence thought patterns. Adrienne Clancy has found that dancing raises children who can creatively problem solve and effectively engage in dialogue despite differences in opinion. In other words, if movement can shape the way we think, then perhaps there isn’t just one kind of intelligence. This underpins Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, in which he names seven different types, including bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence- the ability to use the body to solve problems. This means that, if we are to prepare young people for a world that values innovation, we must start by valuing all kinds of intelligence, not just those useful to the industry.
The UK is facing an employment paradox. We have more graduates than ever, yet fewer graduates in secure high-skilled jobs. According to the Office for National Statistics, nearly one in three UK graduates work in roles that do not require a degree, a worrying phenomenon known as degree inflation. As more people enter higher education, an undergraduate diploma becomes more of a baseline expectation. Employers are no longer interested in what university you attended; they want creativity, adaptability and emotional intelligence, the very skills that the performing arts teach. Studies from the World Economic Forum and the Confederation of British Industry consistently list creative problem-solving and communication among the most sought after skills. Yet these are qualities our education system inhibits when it dismisses dance, creating graduates who are overqualified on paper, but underprepared for life.
Some might say we can’t afford to waste our time teaching children how to dance. I would say, we can’t afford not to. We don’t all need to become dancers, but we all need what dance teaches: confidence, cooperation and the ability to think on our feet. To move forward as a country, we need to stop treating movement as an afterthought. If Britain wants to get unstuck, it needs to let its young people move.
Image: Andrii Zhuk via Unsplash