{"id":484150,"date":"2026-06-05T07:41:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T07:41:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/484150\/"},"modified":"2026-06-05T07:41:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T07:41:08","slug":"lets-not-make-the-same-mistake-as-the-uk-sensible-degrees-are-overrated-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/484150\/","title":{"rendered":"Let\u2019s not make the same mistake as the UK. \u2018Sensible\u2019 degrees are overrated \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

When the ancient Greek philosopher Plato<\/a> imagined his ideal future city, he decided it had no place for poetry. We all love Homer, his argument went, but art misleads us and does not belong in the perfect republic. In any case, how will we even remember poets in the future, he asks. <\/p>\n

Far for me to disagree with Plato, but Homer\u2019s lasting legacies make clear that the arts have played a vital role in the building of many republics since, Ireland\u2019s included. <\/p>\n

During this anxious first week of the Leaving Certificate<\/a>, with the minds of students and their families turning to their degree choices, it\u2019s worth remembering that even ancient Greek philosophers couldn\u2019t tell what practices and skills would prove to be valuable in the future. In the face of artificial intelligence<\/a> (AI), we can\u2019t even tell what skills are going to be useful in five years\u2019 time. <\/p>\n

This is why it\u2019s so concerning when Irish educational policy narrows its priorities to emphasise only the most apparently \u201cuseful\u201d skills and jobs. Where coding or accountancy were trumpeted some years back as the most secure career routes, AI has made visible how much those \u201csensible\u201d jobs may no longer be viable when in many cases early career candidates have been replaced wholesale by machine learning. <\/p>\n

As an arts professor in the United Kingdom<\/a>, I write this from the vantage point of a higher education system where swathes of disciplines in the arts and humanities \u2013 English, history, drama, art, music and, yes, the classics \u2013 are closing or have been cut to the bone in the face of the long governmental emphasis on science subjects. <\/p>\n

Yet we all know that the greatest challenges of our time \u2013 climate catastrophe<\/a>, inflation, inequality and increasing polarisation and populism \u2013 are not challenges that can be solved with one approach alone. It is absurd to imagine how these problems could be tackled without the skills that the arts and humanities offer: rigorous critical reflection, creative problem solving, the capacity to dwell in complexity and ambiguity, and the historical long-view. <\/p>\n

My suggestion that the arts and humanities are being de-prioritised in favour of the sciences isn\u2019t quite right. As an open letter to Research Ireland with more than 2,000 academic signatories makes clear, this narrowing of priorities hasn\u2019t meant a focus on science per se, but is rather an emphasis on application.<\/p>\n

It is the applied sciences \u2013 engineering, computing, medicine \u2013 as well as the most applied features of culture (such as the wellbeing benefits of art) that are prioritised, with the pure sciences such as physics taking a back seat. This is utilitarianism in action \u2013 the greatest good for the greatest number \u2013 emphasising the value of pure knowledge only for the immediately practical activities of building bridges and curing cancer.<\/p>\n

Nobody can really argue with the benefits of bridge-building and curing cancer. But the trouble is, as AI makes clear, how can you really tell what the greatest good is going to be in the long term? <\/p>\n

Electoral cycles make politicians understandably keen to grab hold of immediate, quick results and when a graduate earns a bit more at the start of their career it is easy to say that this must mean that they have done a \u201chigher value\u201d degree \u2013 even if arts graduates catch up with them later. <\/p>\n

But in the longer term, we need to sustain all of the capacities of human endeavour and knowledge, so we have as many tools available for us to face an uncertain future together. <\/p>\n

Ireland has a chance to learn from the UK\u2019s mistakes. <\/p>\n

The creative industries have been identified as one of the six main growth areas of the British economy and one of the UK\u2019s greatest international assets, even while the arts degrees (that have been the bedrock and pipeline for this massive success) are being cut. Long term, the UK risks going down the same path with the creative industries that it did with Brexit<\/a>: not realising what you\u2019ve got until it\u2019s gone. <\/p>\n

So the utilitarian angle might play well politically, but its long-term trajectory could be catastrophic. When coding and accountancy turn out to be far more easily done by machines, the workers trained for those jobs may not have the flexibility and resilience of arts graduates, with the latter\u2019s capacity to apply rigorous critical thinking to a whole host of industries and careers. <\/p>\n

If the Covid pandemic<\/a> taught us anything, it\u2019s that being together and working together require skills that can\u2019t be taken for granted. We need graduates who can build social bridges as well as real ones. To funnel students into a limited set of careers that might well be gone by the time they graduate is not helping them or the world they are heading into. <\/p>\n

Ireland, please learn the lessons from the UK and from Plato. We can\u2019t predict what will ultimately be valued in the future. Ireland can build its own ideal republic \u2013 where poetry as well as plumbing takes pride of place.<\/p>\n

Aoife Monks is professor of cultural and creative industries at Queen Mary University of London and is director of the Queen Mary Centre for Creative Collaboration<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the ancient Greek philosopher Plato imagined his ideal future city, he decided it had no place for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":484151,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,57092,160,61,60,3184,99,147525,80,17159,303],"class_list":["post-484150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-brexit","tag-covid-19","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-leaving-certificate","tag-london","tag-plato","tag-technology","tag-third-level","tag-united-kingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=484150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484150\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/484151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=484150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=484150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}