When the ancient Greek philosopher Plato imagined his ideal future city, he decided it had no place for poetry. We all love Homer, his argument went, but art misleads us and does not belong in the perfect republic. In any case, how will we even remember poets in the future, he asks.
Far for me to disagree with Plato, but Homer’s lasting legacies make clear that the arts have played a vital role in the building of many republics since, Ireland’s included.
During this anxious first week of the Leaving Certificate, with the minds of students and their families turning to their degree choices, it’s worth remembering that even ancient Greek philosophers couldn’t tell what practices and skills would prove to be valuable in the future. In the face of artificial intelligence (AI), we can’t even tell what skills are going to be useful in five years’ time.
This is why it’s so concerning when Irish educational policy narrows its priorities to emphasise only the most apparently “useful” skills and jobs. Where coding or accountancy were trumpeted some years back as the most secure career routes, AI has made visible how much those “sensible” jobs may no longer be viable when in many cases early career candidates have been replaced wholesale by machine learning.
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As an arts professor in the United Kingdom, I write this from the vantage point of a higher education system where swathes of disciplines in the arts and humanities – English, history, drama, art, music and, yes, the classics – are closing or have been cut to the bone in the face of the long governmental emphasis on science subjects.
Yet we all know that the greatest challenges of our time – climate catastrophe, inflation, inequality and increasing polarisation and populism – are not challenges that can be solved with one approach alone. It is absurd to imagine how these problems could be tackled without the skills that the arts and humanities offer: rigorous critical reflection, creative problem solving, the capacity to dwell in complexity and ambiguity, and the historical long-view.
My suggestion that the arts and humanities are being de-prioritised in favour of the sciences isn’t quite right. As an open letter to Research Ireland with more than 2,000 academic signatories makes clear, this narrowing of priorities hasn’t meant a focus on science per se, but is rather an emphasis on application.
It is the applied sciences – engineering, computing, medicine – as well as the most applied features of culture (such as the wellbeing benefits of art) that are prioritised, with the pure sciences such as physics taking a back seat. This is utilitarianism in action – the greatest good for the greatest number – emphasising the value of pure knowledge only for the immediately practical activities of building bridges and curing cancer.
Nobody can really argue with the benefits of bridge-building and curing cancer. But the trouble is, as AI makes clear, how can you really tell what the greatest good is going to be in the long term?
Electoral cycles make politicians understandably keen to grab hold of immediate, quick results and when a graduate earns a bit more at the start of their career it is easy to say that this must mean that they have done a “higher value” degree – even if arts graduates catch up with them later.
But in the longer term, we need to sustain all of the capacities of human endeavour and knowledge, so we have as many tools available for us to face an uncertain future together.
Ireland has a chance to learn from the UK’s mistakes.
The creative industries have been identified as one of the six main growth areas of the British economy and one of the UK’s greatest international assets, even while the arts degrees (that have been the bedrock and pipeline for this massive success) are being cut. Long term, the UK risks going down the same path with the creative industries that it did with Brexit: not realising what you’ve got until it’s gone.
So the utilitarian angle might play well politically, but its long-term trajectory could be catastrophic. When coding and accountancy turn out to be far more easily done by machines, the workers trained for those jobs may not have the flexibility and resilience of arts graduates, with the latter’s capacity to apply rigorous critical thinking to a whole host of industries and careers.
If the Covid pandemic taught us anything, it’s that being together and working together require skills that can’t be taken for granted. We need graduates who can build social bridges as well as real ones. To funnel students into a limited set of careers that might well be gone by the time they graduate is not helping them or the world they are heading into.
Ireland, please learn the lessons from the UK and from Plato. We can’t predict what will ultimately be valued in the future. Ireland can build its own ideal republic – where poetry as well as plumbing takes pride of place.
Aoife Monks is professor of cultural and creative industries at Queen Mary University of London and is director of the Queen Mary Centre for Creative Collaboration
