We now very
frequently hear about “market-driven courses”. According to this outlook,
subjects such as history, literature and philosophy are a mighty waste of time
because the “market” does not need them. Yet if life is only about getting
jobs, then we are cogs in the capitalist machine, and cogs do not need to think.
Indeed, one capitalist is said to have declared that there is no need for
critical thinkers, but only for workers!
In line
with the emphasis on “practical subjects”, we are now told that the writing of
dissertations/theses at university is a waste of time because many people do
not get to read them, and that most of them are of very little practical
benefit. However, this piece of advice, impressive as it may sound, is based on
the assumption that anything we learn in school or university must be of
immediate practical use. If that were true, many of the things we enjoy today
may never have been invented because the ideas behind some of them took
centuries, even millennia, before they were put to practical use. Here are a
few:
- Democritus and Leucippus spoke about atoms
in ancient Greece, but atomic energy was only exploited in the twentieth
century.
- Aristotle wrote a lot about logic, and
from the nineteenth century, more than two thousand years later, that
knowledge was converted into computer science.
- Even the ancient Greek myth of two
brothers, Daedilus and Icarus, who made for themselves wings and flew, was
actualized more than two millennia later with the invention of the
aircraft by the two Wright Brothers (Wilbur and Orville).
So if I was one of the little boys in William Golding’s *Lord of the Flies*, I would have said “sucks to the emphasis on practice above theory!”
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