AI is revaluing human skills: why theater and the performing arts are the best training for the future job market

By Zendoric · June 28, 2026.

The spring of 2026 left a significant figure behind: some 3.9 million high school students graduated in the United States, one of the largest such cohorts in the country's history. According to the World Economic Forum, many of the technical skills they acquired will be obsolete before the decade is out. They are, in a sense, the first class raised entirely in the age of artificial intelligence, and the education system never quite prepared them for it.

Melissa Johnston, executive director of Lemnis, a U.S. educational foundation, lays out in The 74 an argument that deserves attention beyond its opening anecdote: her daughter took part in the school production of *Legally Blonde: The Musical*, and what she learned in that process —coordinating with a diverse cast, managing time under pressure, taking criticism, recovering from live mistakes and holding her presence before an audience— appears on no standardized test and in no academic transcript. Yet it is precisely what the labor market is beginning to demand urgently.

The underlying argument is not new, but the moment makes it far more pressing. For decades, so-called *soft skills* —teamwork, resilience, communication, adaptability— were treated as pleasant but secondary add-ons next to technical or academic competencies. AI-driven automation inverts that hierarchy: precisely because language models and automation systems are extraordinarily efficient at codifiable, repeatable tasks, the capabilities that resist automation —those requiring situational judgment, empathy, improvisation and genuine human collaboration— acquire growing differential value. Johnston calls them *durable skills*, and the evidence she cites suggests they are cultivated mainly outside the conventional classroom: in theater, debate teams, student government, part-time jobs and community involvement.

What is new is that the institutional system is beginning to move. Johnston points to two concrete signals. The first: several U.S. states are revising high school graduation requirements and replacing the traditional diploma with so-called *portraits of a graduate* —documents that try to capture more holistically what a student knows and can do beyond grades. The second: the Carnegie Foundation has just unveiled new skill progressions that aim to break competencies such as collaboration or critical thinking down into their constituent parts, a relevant technical step because only when something can be measured rigorously can it be systematically incorporated into curricula and assessment methods.

From the business side, the signal is also moving. More and more employers are questioning the value of the college degree as a proxy for competence and beginning to design hiring processes that explicitly assess human skills. This is not educational ideology: it is a rational response to an environment where the speed of technological change makes an employee's adaptability matter more than the catalog of knowledge they brought on day one.

There is a structural irony worth underscoring. The same education system that undervalues the performing arts does so, in part, because it does not know how to measure them well. And it does not know how to measure them well because the inherited assessment architecture —standardized tests, course credits— was designed to quantify declarative knowledge, not competence in action. AI, paradoxically, is forcing the system to solve that measurement problem that has gone unaddressed for decades: if you want to train people to work alongside intelligent machines, you need to know precisely what those people contribute that the machines cannot replicate.

Johnston's argument has limitations worth acknowledging. Theater experience at a well-resourced high school is not universally accessible; the inequalities in extracurricular offerings are real and wide. Moreover, the correlation between participation in the performing arts and leadership skills —illustrated with names such as former Disney chief Michael Eisner or Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson— is suggestive but does not by itself constitute robust causal evidence. The argument works better as a guiding framework than as prescriptive education policy.

That said, the underlying direction is sound and increasingly backed by converging trends in the labor market, skills research and the very institutional moves Johnston describes. The real bet is broader than theater: it is that any experience —athletic, artistic, community-based, work-related— should stop being treated as a backdrop to the academic curriculum and start being understood as a core part of education. In a world where AI models can generate code, draft reports and analyze data, people's competitive advantage will increasingly lie in what happens when you have to lead a team in an ambiguous situation, negotiate under pressure or inspire trust in a room. Those things are learned by rehearsing them, not by memorizing them.