Author JD Cowan recently shared a post inspired by a video from author Hilary Lane that cuts straight to the heart of modern cultural decay: Our institutions don’t train creators; they manufacture content producers.
What passes for education today is not a process of formation but a system of standardization, and that system’s first victim was the human imagination.
Some say the schools stifle creativity. But that implies creativity even had room to grow there. The truth is harsher: The education system was never designed to foster imagination. It was designed to produce interchangeable cogs. That design was deliberate, and it worked.
To understand the creative drought afflicting every field from fiction to film, you have to start with what education became after the Industrial Revolution. The old ideal of education—formation of the soul through truth, beauty, and goodness—was replaced by a mechanized model meant to shape workers for assembly lines.
Teachers became foremen in conformity mills where children mainly learned to govern their activities according to bells. Grading depended on compliance rather than creativity or even critical thinking.
This system was never about learning, but imposing brutal efficiency. And once the technocrats discovered they could apply the same principles to art, the outcome was inevitable.
Hollywood, publishing, and academia now operate like production lines. They don’t make stories; they make content.
The difference isn’t semantic. A story transmits meaning through human experience. Content fills a quota.
The fact that A.I. can now replicate content tells you all you need to know. The machine didn’t make art soulless. It simply revealed that we’ve been making machine art for a while now.
The education system lies when it claims to value creativity. In practice, these institutions enforce conformity with more zeal than any cult. You’re allowed to question everything … except the underlying dogmas of materialism, egalitarianism, and progress.
Students are told to express themselves, but only within the narrow aesthetic boundaries approved by committees who despise beauty and fear truth. If your son writes an essay about why he likes bunnies, he’ll be scolded for hurting dog owners’ feelings. Subjective sentiment; not authorial intent, reigns supreme.
The result is an entire generation of artists trained to imitate the same system that crushed their souls. Their art doesn’t express reality. It regurgitates propaganda.
Cowan and Lane both note that this artificiality didn’t start with A.I. The system has been training human beings to act like machines for decades. The A.I. explosion is merely the natural endpoint of an education philosophy that started from a false theory of mind: worshiping intelligence instead of exercising it.
It goes to show that everybody gets idolatry backwards. The industrial age worshiped efficiency, then made idols of machines. The digital age worships data, so we made an idol of the algorithm.
Both cults share the same creed: control.
That’s the hidden dynamic behind the modern education system: the belief that human nature can be optimized by applying empirical techniques. To the materialist mind, imagination isn’t a reflection of the divine; it’s an inefficiency to be corrected.
But imagination isn’t wasteful escapism; it’s participation in the act of creation. To imagine is to conceptualize created being which bears God’s image.
That’s why all totalitarian regimes from Soviet commissars to corporate DEI boards target imagination first. The tyrant fears nothing more than a mind that dreams of worlds beyond his control.
The collapse of imagination explains why every major creative industry is in freefall. Hollywood is imploding. Oldpub is shrinking. Music is increasingly base and dissonant.
The old studios and houses are dying because they trained their heirs to produce instead of create. When your highest value is output, your end product can never surpass the sum of its parts.
That’s why every new film is a reboot. Every song sounds like the last one. Every new idea in legacy publishing is a pastiche of a pastiche. The machine can only move around its own debris.
But here’s the twist: The audience has been conditioned, too. The same industrial mindset that killed art also trained consumers to crave constant stimulation instead of beauty.
That’s why people say they want content instead of stories. They’ve been fed empty calories so long, they’re addicted to constant, shallow stimulation.
The system doesn’t want visionaries. It wants clerks. And a clerk that never sleeps or demands royalties is the regime’s ideal.
Blaming A.I. misses the point. The algorithm isn’t taking jobs from artists; it’s just replacing clerks with faster clerks.
Cowan asks the crucial question: How do we build a system that incentivizes creativity over slop?
The answer is more theological than practical.
Industrial models of education and the culture that grew from them rest on a false anthropology that sees man as a mechanism to be fine-tuned. Until we reject that lie, every reform will produce the same results under a new brand name.
The only cure is re-enchantment: restoring a sacramental view of reality. We must again see the world not as a machine, but as a creation: ordered, meaningful, and alive. True art begins not with rebellion against limits, but with awe before the infinite.
We will not fix the culture by teaching creativity workshops. We must recover the understanding that beauty is not subjective, that creativity is participation in a divinely decreed order, and that truth cannot be engineered.
This is why independent creators working outside the dying institutions are vital. They are the seeds of renewal precisely because they operate outside the system’s logic. Instead of content producers, they are craftsmen, builders, and witnesses.
As Cowan says, the 20th century is dead. The system that built it is collapsing under its own contradictions. We can’t save it; nor should we. What we can do is sow new seeds in the plot of soil we’re given while the machine rusts into dust.
The future belongs not to the efficient, but to the inspired.
Brian Niemeier is a best-selling novelist, editor, and Dragon Award winner with over a decade in newpub. For direct, in-person writing and editing insights, join his Patreon.
NEXT: Johnny Depp To Star As Ebenezer Scrooge In New Adaptation Of ‘A Christmas Carol’
 | A guest post by
|
C.S. Lewis talked about this in Screwtape Proposes a Toast. "The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be "undemocratic." These differences among the pupils--for they are odiously and nakedly INDIVIDUAL differences--must be disguised." "The few who want to learn [i.e., excel] will be prevented--who are they to overtop their fellows?" This is in action now. See articles about Fairfax County, VA schools that WITHHELD merit awards earned by high-achieving students because it might have hurt the feelings of the "dunces and idlers" in their classes. In the past, failing to get a merit award would have been considered motivation to do better next time. Now we have to round off all the edges so no one gets hurt. "Let no man live who is wiser, or better, or more famous, or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level. All equals. Thus tyrants could practice, in a sense, 'democracy.'"
Overall, congratulations on the text. However, from the second half onward, I find some differences. I don’t agree that beauty is something objective, nor that the creative act is related only to the sacred, the divine, or directly to God. I also find it too bold to claim that the 20th century was a complete failure. The 20th century represented a complex web of exchanges, discourses, and movements that we still cannot fully understand today, as we lack the necessary historical distance. I believe this text takes advantage of a crisis (that of creativity and art) to revive and legitimize an old, elitist discourse that sets us back as human beings. Art and creativity are human matters, not divine ones; they are within everyone’s reach, and it depends on us how deeply we develop them and how we relate to them.