Good to see them focussing on the issues that really matter at the moment.
Wouldn't disagree with your assessment but who is Sunak to tell students what to study?
And what's wrong with doing subjects for their own sake rather than their utility value in terms of what salary you end up earning?
For example, I left school at the age of 16 and went to work for what was then one of the top ten firms of chartered accountants as a Junior Audit Clerk on the strength of my O Level grades. At that time you could study to be a chartered accountant without having a degree. Unfortunately, with my temperament, I wasn't at all suited to preparing dull sets of figures and a life measured out with coffee spoons. So I eventually ended up doing something far less remunerative but a lot more rewarding.
Am therefore concerned that the arts and humanities might get sidelined if Sunak has his way. And it's just the sort of policy that might meet with approval from other Tories.
Accordingly, have just started reading Martha Nussbaum's
Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.
The blub on the back is interesting:
'We increasingly treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable and empathetic citizens. This shortsighted focus on profitable skills has eroded our ability to criticize authority, reduced our sympathy with the marginalized and different, and damaged our competence to deal with complex global problems.'
And this is from page 2, where Nussbaum writes of what she considers to be a global crisis in education:
'Radical changes are occurring in what democratic societies teach the young...Thirsty for national profit, nations, and their systems of education are heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive. If this trend continues, nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the significance of another person's sufferings and achievements. The future of the world's democracies hangs in the balance.
What are these radical changes? The humanities and the arts are being cut away, in both primary/secondary and college/university education, in virtually every nation of the world. Seen by policy-makers as useless frills, at a time when nations must cut away all useless things in order to stay competitive in the global market, they are rapidly losing their place in curricula, and also in the minds and hearts of parents and children...as nations prefer to pursue short-term profit by the cultivation of the useful and highly applied skills suited to profit-making.'
Nussbaum is one of the world's leading scholars of Aristotle. For Aristotle, life is all about becoming well-rounded rather than a shallow, stunted, self-serving person like Sunak, or Truss for that matter.
But that is maybe what the Tories seem to want, to flatten everything and everybody into one dimension, so that efficiency is preferred to truth, and we all get to be used as efficiently as possible.
Nussbaum is asking the right questions too. From page 28:
'What is it about human life that makes it so hard to sustain democratic institutions based on equal respect and the equal protection of the laws, and so easy to lapse into hierarchies of various types - or even worse, projects of violent group animosity? What forces make powerful groups seek control and domination? What makes majorities try, so ubiquitously, to denigrate and stigmatize minorities? Whatever these forces are, it is ultimately against them that true education for responsible national and global citizenship must fight.'
Think I am therefore going to like this book.
Plus, it draws on the educational theories of Rabindranath Tagore to support its thesis, which is kind of ironic given Sunak's background.
Okay. Rant over.
