In late 2014, the Secretary of State for Education declared that the days when arts and humanities subjects could be relied on as useful were behind us, and that STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) were the way to go. For all of her subsequent backpedaling on this point, it remains pretty clear that arts and humanities are considered soft and irrelevant by this government.
STEM subjects are vital, of course, and I welcome the Prime Minister’s recent announcement of a government push on maths, science and technology in schools, and a new national college for digital skills and coding. Nonetheless, I remain concerned about this instinct to promote STEM subjects at the expense of a wider education. It needn’t be a zero sum game.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that people invested in the arts should come out in their defence when they see them threatened. I – and Bedales – fall into this category: we are alarmed that the arts and humanities have been effectively banished to the margins of the national curriculum. Interestingly, however, scientists and standard bearers of technological innovation have encouraged more nuanced views on the subject.The late Steve Jobs, for example, saw artistic sensibilities as central to Apple’s business. Perhaps more dramatically, Albert Einstein was convinced that music was a guiding principle in the search for important results in theoretical physics.
Various researchers have also found a positive relationship between participation in arts and crafts and success in scientific and technological careers. In 2008 a study of large numbers of scientists found that the most eminent were significantly more likely to spend some of their time in productive arts and crafts pursuits, with the resulting skills being of direct professional benefit. This is not a new phenomenon – in the late 1900s J.H. van’t Hoff investigated several hundred historical figures in science and concluded that the most innovative of them pursued arts and crafts when they weren’t hard at work on the day job.
This reinforces what we at Bedales know intuitively to be true. Ours is an arts-rich education, and whilst many of our students go on to make successful careers for themselves in creative pursuits, many others enter other fields, such as science and technology, and tell us of the value of their grounding in the arts and humanities to their work.
However, to argue for the arts and humanities purely on this basis is to accept that their value must be calibrated through the prism of economic activity and growth. Those of us working in related areas will of course also argue for their value on their own terms. They help us to understand and participate in the world, and to become more fulfilled people. Recent arguments about the abundance of independently educated people in creative professions give voice to an important concern: our culture is diminished when it risks the exclusion of some. However, the argument also masks the withdrawal of state investment – attitudinal as well as financial – in things being any different.
It is heartening, therefore, to see the recommendations of the recently published report from the Warwick Commission on the Future of Cultural Value – Enriching Britain: Culture, Creativity and Growth. The report argues for the importance of the contribution of the creative industries to the UK through economic employment and growth. However – and this is critical in my view – it also argues that such an analysis alone is insufficient, and draws attention to the work of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in trying to establish a more appropriate metric.
Like the authors, I want to see more attention paid to the value of creative activity in bringing people together, and to ensure that the benefits are available to everybody: crucial in these angry and polarised times. In a world too often at ideological loggerheads, the arts and humanities offer the possibility of people coming together, and exploration of difference – one that an economically-driven social and cultural orthodoxy demonstrably cannot.
The arts-sciences dichotomy has not always been as unshakeable as it appears today. Jung’s ‘Artist-Scientist’ archetype united these supposedly disparate elements in the wonders and dangers implicit in curiosity. More recently, the sociologist Richard Florida posited a ‘creative class’ made up of scientists and engineers as well as poets and people in design and the arts. This idea may well have found favour with Jobs and Einstein alike, and most certainly has currency here at Bedales.
The time for government to re-evaluate the importance of the arts and humanities is upon us. Although we may have entered an educational cul-de-sac with regard to the relative importance of the various aspects of the school curriculum, the good news is that there is no shortage of assistance available to policy makers in steering us back out.
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