13 Aug Morrison Dumbs it Down

These days, it’s hard to find a news story not related to Covid 19. The pandemic has touched so many aspects of our lives, it makes it impossible to have a conversation without it coming up.

But while we’ve been distracted with the immediate threat of the virus, governments have been going ahead implementing policy agendas without the normal level of scrutiny. For example, the decision by the Morrison government to increase the cost of a university humanities degree by 113% has gone almost unquestioned. Ironically, the holistic, multidimensional thinking we need to dig us out of the Covid collapse, is the very thing that is being priced out of the education market.

For many years, an arts degree has been the punchline of any joke that starts with an unemployed uni grad, but the joke might end up being on the Feds. According to Forbes, a liberal arts degree is now the “hottest ticket in tech.” McKinsey, BCG, Amazon, Google and Apple, all actively recruit those with a background in ethics, philosophy, history and politics to inform the development of everything from artificial intelligence to facial recognition  technology. The new focus on ‘job ready’ degrees such as teaching and nursing, will potentially leave a whole generation of creative, analytical, problem solvers, being shunted into one dimensional, vocationally focussed training.

It’s no coincidence that the federal government’s attack on the media and freedom of speech is now bleeding into the very institutions that train people to question, challenge and research our leaders. It’s a little bit of social engineering under the guise of, ‘jobs, jobs, jobs.’

The liberal arts doesn’t just produce pot smoking lefties who are a drain on the economy, but highly intelligent entrepreneurs.  Just ask Stewart Butterfield of Slack (philosophy), Jack Ma of Alibaba (English) Brian Chesky of Airbnb (fine arts) and Susan Wojciciki of YouTube (history and literature).

Scotty from marketing obviously thinks he knows better and wants us all studying disciplines with prescribed ways of thinking and ‘real life’ applications. Although engineering, physiotherapy, medicine, teaching etc will always play a vital role in our future economic success, we will never transcend a unidirectional political paradigm, without a liberal sprinkling of free-thinking arts graduates. Arguing otherwise, is just plain dumb.

Linked references

• Forbes
• ABC News
• Times of India