February 28, 2010
More than Maths
From today’s Observer editorial:
“It is true that not enough school leavers enter those fields [science, engineering, maths]. But while it is desirable that Britain is economically and commercially competitive, it does not follow that all Britons should learn just economics and commerce. The study of history, philosophy, languages and literature broadens horizons and animates minds that go on to enrich society in many ways. The advantages that flow from research into the creative output of humanity might not be obviously financial, but they are incalculable.”
And of course, one of the main ways in which arts and humanities graduates enrich society is…by writing for and editing national newspapers!
But of course I agree with the sentiment. And the following is a fairly good diagnosis of the present (and likely future) Government’s philistine and short-termist attitude to what has “worth” and therefore deserves to be funded:
“But government’s unerring tendency is to calculate, especially when money is scarce. That leads to silly exercises in evaluating the “impact” of different departments’ research in terms of economic utility. In that game the dice are loaded against the humanities. The virtues of poetry do not fit neatly in a spreadsheet.”
Certainly, the obsession with “impact” is becoming worrying for arts and humanities departments. It’s somewhat difficult to demonstrate what your department’s economic “impact” has been when it might take 20 years for your history or English or philosophy graduates to have their economic influence, directly or indirectly. And furthermore, you’ll likely never know for sure what their “impact” was without observing a world in which there aren’t any such graduates, in order to be able to compare and contrast. A price which most sane people would consider hardly worth paying.
But overall, for my money Simon Blackburn makes the best case as to why the Government’s approach to this issue is very, very stupid.
RA said,
March 1, 2010 at 3:31 am
Yes but increased mathematics training is a prerequisite to becoming a competent student of the humanities. After all, how else is one supposed to unlock the true meanings of historical texts except through sophisticated numerological analysis?
Paul Sagar said,
March 1, 2010 at 7:29 am
Good point. How else will they decipher the correct way to count the footnotes and divide by the number of pages?