John Major was still Prime Minister and Bill Clinton the US President. It was Blur vs Oasis in the charts and the Spice Girls were yet to release their first single. The internet was in its infancy, used mainly only by universities, and mobile phones were luxuries possessed only by bankers and estate agents. It was also the year that I started teaching Physics.
In those days Physics was something of a subject in crisis. Numbers studying it and other sciences at A Level were on the decline and, in an attempt to reverse this, the new national curriculum made science compulsory to GCSE. It didn’t seem to be working however, and for much of the 90s and beyond, there was much discussion about how we persuaded youngsters to study science to higher levels.
It wasn’t straightforward; science A Levels were (and still are) not easy. They require high level problem solving skills as well as a body of knowledge which can be technically demanding as well as high in content. There was much grinding of teeth when pupils went for “softer”subjects as curricula diversified and new A Levels came along.
As I look back at this now, the pendulum seems to have swung well and truly the other way. Entries for STEM subjects as we now call them are riding high and the trend continues upwards. This continues through to university where a bewildering variety of science-related disciplines are available for the student, often with a link to industry thrown in. It’s not hard to understand the reasons why there is a greater interest now in these subjects. Governments, employers and businesses have all stressed the employability of graduates with degrees in science and the country has issued a call to arms for science to be one of 5e bedrocks of the future economy.
I should be delighted. And yet, somehow I am not. Whilst much has changed since 1995, the A Level curriculum, thanks to Michael Gove, would look reassuringly familiar to those who I first taught. Most sixth formers study three subjects and so options choices are something of a zero sum game. The rise in science subjects has come at the expense of the other curriculum areas, such as English Literature, History and languages (which is a whole other issue in itself). The decline of creative subjects such as Art and Music has been even more marked.
Whilst I yield to no one in my love for Physics, I would not want to see the humanities enter a period of dwindling numbers and reduced provision. No doubt that science and engineering are crucial for the UK’s position, but there is more to a society than employability. The humanities and arts are a hugely important part of our culture and our history, and we lose something of ourselves if the number of inhabitants of these islands who understand something of its history, both in the political sense but also the cultural sense, reduces.
Those who work in education speak often of cultural capital the osmotic process by which access to books, museums and libraries allows youngsters to learn something of the world around them. Matthew Arnold defined culture as “the best that has been thought and said”and, if the numbers of adults educated in that falls, then it becomes progressively harder for our children to come to know that cultural capital. We owe it to them to keep the arts and humanities alive in our schools and our society.