8 November

I took a not very common pathway through education in the modern world. I studied sciences, maths and engineering, as well as the humanities, music and art. I worked bloody hard in all of them (still do), and did well in all of them. It never even occurred to me to focus on just one part of the curriculum, I think if you do, you can never really understand anything properly. Now we have appallingly arrogant scientists completely dismissing the humanities as fairy tales, and humanities-trained people dismissing the sciences and engineering as "just numbers". Both sides of the curriculum don't understand the other side, and create caricatures of each other. Meanwhile members of the public say a pox on both your houses, and show little interest in ideas at all and escape into fantasy. And it starts in schools, and continues into universities. The idea of 'ability' is one of the most tragic lies ever allowed into education. Kids are allowed to completely ditch or almost ignore maths and science, for example, if it's deemed they have little 'ability' in it. And the same for the humanities subjects. Usually ability is just an excuse for poor teaching, I haven't met a student yet with apparently no ability in a subject, who didn't suddenly perform wonderfully with proper teaching. But it gets worse, because kids are increasingly allowed to bypass maths, science and the humanities altogether, in favour of 'interest' subjects that 'make them happy'. Our response to the mess is to just run away from it altogether and not even try. Look at some of these numbers, and you can see how this is playing out. If you wonder why outrageously stupid things are allowed to happen in this world, I think here's a place to start.