Creative Commons License

Tuesday 7 December 2010

Some notes on the nature of Art... (5) Art and Education

The problem such as it is comes with attempting to give them what they want. And who are they 'they' in this case? Funding bodies, MPs, Vice-Chancellors, and all the others who look to higher education that is not strictly vocational as a luxury.
If the current generation have been raised to look at university education and ask 'what's it worth?' or rather 'what job will it get me?' then the answer to the problem lies not in giving them a quantitative answer (“Philosophy is, in commercial jargon, the ultimate ‘transferable work skill”) but a qualitative one.
It (the arts and the humanities) has a value intrinsically, but this gesture of value can never be enough. Instead there should be a detailing of the value of the arts in a way were value itself is shown to be undermined in the accountant's sense of value.