‘AXING ARTS’ – a response

Please allow me to disagree with your editorial of September 8th – “Axing Arts”.

The subject reminded me of a cartoon that appeared in your own newspaper a few weeks ago. In it, a young man is consulting a fortune-teller who looks into her Crystal Ball and exclaims – “that’s unusual! It’s blank. I can’t see any future for you at all!” He replies. “How can it be? I even have a Master’s Degree in Humanities”.

It’s a fact of life that the Arts graduates almost worldwide are no-hopers, with no hope of employment in the open Job market with, perhaps, the road to Parliament and Politics, as their only lucrative career path. Overseas, PM Boris Johnson, and Chris Patten, ex-Hong Kong governor are examples.

Your editorial has conjoined two issues, namely, that [reflected in the UGC action is the government thinking that preparing students for the job market is the be-all and end-all of university education, and] the Arts stream is something to be tolerated, not promoted”, (true) but it does not necessarily follow that “government thinking is that preparing students for the job market, is the be-all and end- all of University education.” In today’s world of worldwide unemployment and recession, the government is fully entitled to expect that the products of the 15 years of ‘learn by rote education” at taxpayer expense, is at least fit for some kind of Job, (other than “teaching” – i. e. making more replicas of him/herself).

A typical local Arts graduate – with almost zero mathematical ability, minimal General Knowledge, unable to either read or speak English, therefore unable to access and properly use the Internet, is (in your words), ” Not attractive enough in the job market”. So should we, the public, having paid for this ‘useless’ education, have to subsidize his/her employment as well?

Not only should the external Arts programmes be axed completely but the internal ones as well. The Arts programme should be limited to an elite small group of talented artistes who have earned their place due to exceptional, (not mediocre), talents in Art, Language, Music or Drama etc. Because of the limited output and high competition, these graduates will find ready employment, not burden the taxpayer, nor need to go on strike for their imagined ‘rights’.

It is a known fact that the main perpetrators of ‘ragging’, a form of Sadism on our campuses, not seen anywhere else on earth, are Arts faculty students. Many of our politicians had their early “training” in leadership, via the “Ragging” process, if many reports on Social Media are to be believed. Your Editorial quotes at length from an American source- “The American Academy of Arts and Sciences”, which is largely irrelevant to us – for instance, they ask, ‘who will lead (America’s) Foreign Service and Military through complex global conflicts?”

Does Sri Lanka have the leadership in such ‘complex global conflicts’ to worry about? The so-called “richest country on Earth”, and Europe, may have the resources to disburse/waste on Liberal Arts graduates who can later make their way (at taxpayer expense) in Politics (Boris Johnson and Hong Kong ex-governor Chris Patten are good examples), but in these multi-crisis days , WE CERTAINLY DO NOT!

JAYANTHA KURUKULASURIYA

Editor’s note:

The main thrust of our editorial was based on the following quotation from the ‘Heart of the Matter’ report put out by the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, appointed by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (emphasis added): “The future will still need the human skills that the liberal arts promote, and perhaps will need them more than ever: skills in communication, interpretation, linking and synthesizing domains of knowledge, and imbuing facts with meaning and value … [social sciences and the Humanities] help us understand what it means to be human and connect us with our global community.”

It was at the request of the US Congress that ‘The Heart of the Matter’ report was produced and the commission included a large group of leaders in higher education, government, business, the arts, and other sectors of society. Presented to the US Congress in June 2013, the report’s intent was ‘to advance a dialogue on the importance of the humanities and social sciences to the future of our [American] nation’.

What is needed is to update the arts degree programmes here as other countries have done, and not axe them at the whims and fancies of politicians, who should be able to understand the difference between universities and technical colleges and that there is much more to universities than preparing students for the job market.