Economics or education?

I have a rather long letter in the state newspaper this morning. I was not sure it would get in or, if it did get in, they would use it without "editing" it. There is always a danger that the point you wish to make can get edited out and you then appear to be saying something entirely different.

But no, this one was printed in full. I was commenting on the proposed merger of two universities in this state. We have three universities at present. One is of course the oldest and first of them. It is the university the Senior Cat and Brother Cat attended. (I first went to university in another country.)  It was a traditional university back then. It produced more than one Nobel Prize winner and has had others on the staff. I worked there for a while.

Over the years it has become more conscious of what can only be called "economics". Some of the traditional courses have been cut back to a minimum. Almost all of them have been in "the arts". While "aboriginal languages" have been given a boost in funding the teaching of other modern languages has declined. English is also on steady decline. Psychology has moved to focus on "workplace" issues. Linguistics demands work in the aboriginal languages of this state. Philosophy is all too often demanding the agreement with woke ideas. There is more demand to agree in Economics, Business and Marketing. Even Law has not escaped entirely with woke ideas being presented and demands they be argued.

And we have the science side, physics and astrophysics

"Students don't want to do those. There's no work in those areas," I am told of arts subjects. They are also being told this. Students are being shunted into science. 

I wonder how the Whirlwind would cope if she was still alive. At school she was under pressure to "choose science". She was not interested. She studied the science which was compulsory. She didn't "hate" it but she didn't enjoy it. Words were of far greater interest. From the time she was small and I was reading stories to her she had wanted to know the meaning of words and where they had come from. Unlike so many young people I know she actually used her dictionary. By that I mean she did not simply look at the definition of a word but also at the origin. 

Despite all this she was still under pressure to "choose science because that is where the jobs are".  It did not seem to occur to anyone other than her father or myself that she might not be happy "doing science". There are still roles for our arts students. She had thought of things like translating and interpreting, librarianship and law. I think she would have been very good at any of those things. I doubt she would have made a good scientist. She would tell me, "I do not like science pracs" - laboratory sessions in science. That she was doing well in them was beside the point. She did not like doing the work. 

I wonder how many other young students are like this. How many of them are being told, both directly and indirectly, that they "must" do science? If they do add an arts subject to the mix it is the sort of English where they "study" film posters and make short films. (Yes, that's fine in a way but there is more to English than that.) If they choose to do a language it will be one that is considered "useful" rather than a language they can actually use with their own relatives.

I may be wrong but I can't help feeling education is becoming about the economic interests of society rather than the actual education of all of us.