If we don’t adequately fund the arts, where will all the digital con­tent come from?

Recent noises from within the UK’s fund­ing struc­tures sug­gest that the future for arts and human­it­ies edu­ca­tion is some­what threatened. In a time of restric­ted resources (the argu­ment goes) the avail­able fund­ing needs to be focused on top­ics that make a clear, trace­able con­tri­bu­tion to the national eco­nomy. This essen­tially means sup­port­ing the STEM sub­jects — sci­ence, tech­no­logy, engin­eer­ing and medi­cine — at the expense of the arts and humanities.

As a com­puter sci­ent­ist I might be expec­ted to be loosely in favour of such a move: after all, it pro­tects my discipline’s fund­ing (at least par­tially). But this is to mis-understand the inter­con­nec­ted nature of know­ledge, of schol­ar­ship, and of the mod­ern world as a whole.

We need first to think about how people use their degrees. Con­trary to pop­u­lar belief (even amongst stu­dents), degrees don’t gen­er­ally lead to jobs — and nor should they. It’s true that we teach a lot of inform­a­tion and skills in a degree: how to pro­gram, how to ana­lyse algorithms and under­stand dif­fer­ent tech­no­lo­gies, in the case of com­puter sci­ence. But this isn’t the reason to get a degree.

What we try to teach are the crit­ical skills needed to under­stand the world, con­trib­ute to it and change it. Com­puter sci­ence is a great example of this. Three years ago there were no tab­let com­puters and no cloud com­put­ing: the field changes rad­ic­ally even on the times­cales of a typ­ical degree pro­gramme. So there’s not really much point in focus­ing on par­tic­u­lar tech­no­lo­gies or lan­guages. What we teach instead is how to learn new lan­guages and tech­no­lo­gies, and how to assess how they fit into the chan­ging pat­tern of com­puter sci­ence. Put another way, we have to turn them into people who can learn and assim­il­ate com­plex tech­no­lo­gical ideas through­out their lives, and cre­ate new ones

Edu­ca­tion is what sur­vives when what has been learnt has been forgotten

B.F. Skin­ner

This is even more true in human­it­ies. Most people who study geo­graphy do not become geo­graph­ers (or polar explorers, for that mat­ter): they go into fields that require crit­ical minds who can come to grips with com­plex ideas. But they bring to these jobs an appre­ci­ation of a com­plex and layered sub­ject, an abil­ity to deal with mul­tiple sim­ul­tan­eous con­straints and demands upon shared resources, the inter­ac­tion of people with the nat­ural world, and so forth. This is much more valu­able than the spe­cific know­ledge they may have acquired: they have the abil­ity to acquire spe­cific know­ledge whenever they need it, and to fit it into the wider scheme of their understanding.

But even if we accept in part the nar­rower view of edu­ca­tion as a dir­ect feeder for the eco­nomy — and real­ist­ic­ally we have to accept it at least to some extent — redu­cing human­it­ies gradu­ates seems short­sighted. If we also accept that the future is of a digital and know­ledge eco­nomy, then the tech­no­lo­gies under­ly­ing this eco­nomy are only one part of it — and prob­ably only a small part. The rest, the higher-value ser­vices, come from con­tent and applic­a­tions, not dir­ectly from the technology.

Con­sider how much value has been cre­ated from build­ing com­puters. Now con­sider how much value is cre­ated from selling things that use com­puters. Com­puter sci­ent­ists didn’t cre­ate much of the lat­ter; nor did phys­i­cists, math­em­aticians, mater­i­als sci­ent­ists or elec­tronic engin­eers. Human­it­ies people did.

So even aside from the reduc­tion in qual­ity of life that would come from redu­cing the con­tri­bu­tions of people who’ve stud­ied his­tory and lit­er­at­ure, there’s a dir­ect eco­nomic effect in play. Without such people, there’ll be no-one to cre­ate the digital con­tent and ser­vices on which the know­ledge eco­nomy depends. (It’s called know­ledge eco­nomy, remem­ber, not sci­ence eco­nomy.) Increas­ing the pro­por­tion of know­ledge­able, edu­cated people is valu­able per se for the cre­ativ­ity those people unleash. The fact that we per­haps can’t dir­ectly trace the route from uni­ver­sity stu­dent places to value to soci­ety doesn’t make that con­tri­bu­tion unreal: it just means we’re not meas­ur­ing it.

When we went about invent­ing com­puters and the inter­net we had spe­cific goals in mind, to do with sci­entific ana­lysis and com­mu­nic­a­tion. But it turned out that the most socially sig­ni­fic­ant impacts of these tech­no­lo­gies didn’t come from these areas at all: they came from people who thought dif­fer­ently about the tech­no­logy and came up with applic­a­tions that no com­puter sci­ent­ist would ever have thought of. It still amazes me that no pro­fes­sional com­puter sci­ent­ist — includ­ing me — ever dreamed of social net­work sites like Face­book, even though we hap­pily talked about con­cepts like “social net­work” and of using com­puters to exam­ine the ways people inter­ac­ted at least five years before it deb­uted. We don’t have the mind­set to come up with these sorts of applic­a­tions: we’re too close to the tech­no­logy. Sci­ent­ists can hap­pily develop ser­vices for sci­ence: it needs people who are closer to the human­it­ies to develop ser­vices for humanity.

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