Study arts and humanities because you love them (and so do employers, by the way)

Whatever their GCSE results, students should be told the whole story: understanding languages and cultures is a huge advantage in the workplace

Xaymaca Awoyungbo

I reflect on GCSE results day with a sense of pride tinged with sadness. Proud because this year’s cohort achieved fantastic results, given the challenges they have faced since the pandemic, but sad because for many it will be the last time they study humanities (languages, history and religious and classical studies) subjects.

I won’t hide my bias: I studied Spanish, history and philosophy and ethics at A-level, and Latin and religious studies at GCSE, so I’m a strong advocate for the humanities. Yet, they’re steadily becoming an unpopular choice, with only 38% of students taking at least one humanities course in the 2021/22 cohort compared to just under 60% from 2003/4 to 2015/16.

One reason for this decline can be traced back to Michael Gove’s decision to decouple AS-levels from A-levels – with many students now forgoing AS-levels altogether in favour of the new two-year A-level course. Students who might previously have studied three Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects and one humanities for AS-level are narrowing their choices to three much earlier as a result of the split. But I fear there’s another factor influencing young people’s decisions: money….

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/22/study-arts-humanities-employers-gcse-results

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Simon Leys: The View from the Bridge. His lectures on Learning, Reading, Writing and Going Abroad and Staying Home (1996)

Written on Water

The Peacock’s Graveyard

Sanskrit translation of Don Quixote rescued from oblivion

Sabry Hafez: the Novel, Politics and Islam – Haydar Haydar’s Banquet for Seaweed

Albert Camus’s lecture ‘The Human Crisis’, New York, March 1946. ‘No cause justifies the murder of innocents’

Invincible Summer – Albert Camus

ALBERT CAMUS: by Nicola Chiaromonte

Albert Camus: Create Dangerously (1957)

Resistance, Rebellion, & Writing – Albert Camus’s dispatches on the Algerian crisis