I didn't see any mentions of banning "poets and historians" in the article (though I just skimmed to be fair). What I saw was China cutting public funding for some majors.
If someone wants to be a poet, or a historian, or anything else, more power to him. Why on everyone else's money, though?
To be honest, if your calling to become a poet is stopped by a government's funding decision, you wouldn't have made much of a poet anyway.
How do you quantify the importance of a major compared to another? Certainly poets, historians, artists, and writers have more than a monetary importance in society. How do you measure the inspiration a great writer generates? How do you objectively compare the societal benefit of a mathematician versus a historian so that you can mete their funding accordingly?
I see a lot of "bootstraps" comments in the tech field— specifically about the liberal arts— and it's a shame. I wouldn't be in this field if it weren't for some of those "worthless" degrees like English (great writing helps the learning process) and Design (people are attracted to good-looking websites).
My apologies if I got a little ranty. It just irks me to see someone putting down another field of study as though they're a drain on society.
If you push on the supply side without pulling on the demand side, you're going to squash a lot of liberal arts majors against the wall. As a society, we are probably employing more academics than ever: more historians, more philosophers, more classicists, more literature critics. But we are producing even more graduates and graduate students who there are fundamentally not enough positions for, later on up the pipeline. And the typical English BA who works as a barista doesn't necessarily produce lots of poetry or anything on their free time.
Poets and writers today, and throughout time, live unique, often impoverished existences without necessarily being part of an academic establishment or having relevant education. Or they make tons of money selling dramatic scripts to the masses. If Shakespeare were alive today he'd be a screenwriter.
How do you objectively compare the societal benefit of a mathematician versus a historian so that you can mete their funding accordingly?
From the article:The government will soon start evaluating college majors by their employment rates, downsizing or cutting those studies in which less than 60% of graduates fail for two consecutive years to find work.
Setting aside the question of whether that is a particularly good method, I'd like to suggest that it's at least more objective and quantifiable than just presuming that a degree in any given subject is equally the cause of or prerequisite to greatness in a given field, and therefore of equal value. Great art doesn't depend on art degrees to the same extent that great science depends on science degrees.
The problem surely is that your evaluating by employment rates right now , this will not necessarily be so in the future and the govt probably isn't the best at predicting future demand. Geography is also a factor here.
What you risk doing is grossly over subscribing 'boom' fields and driving down salaries of competent people within those fields.
First is that no education should take place on someone else's dime. Let the market sort it out. So don't subsidize literature or mathematics, film studies or nuclear engineering. Step back and let the market work it out.
The second is that the government should subsidize education, on the notion that some fields, such as science and engineering, generate positive externalities that can't be recouped by the practitioners of these fields. As you can probably tell, I think there's a lot of merit to this argument, especially in core science. I think that a scientist or engineer who earns 100K a year often generates far more wealth than, say, a mortgage broker who earns 100K a year. It does make sense to me that the government would try to find ways to encourage this.
If you feel this way, you probably don't mind educational subsidies and tax breaks for certain types of activities (by the way, I read somewhere that China has excepted software engineers from certain types of income taxes).
While I probably sound enthusiastic about this kind of arrangement, the truth is I'm ambivalent about it, largely because I have serious doubts that this kind of government interference will work. Instead, it often leads to a system that is easily gamed (engineering majors take the subsidy and then go work on wall street, and get a tax break because they write software for trading algorithms).
So in the end, I tend to favor a more hands-off, market based approach - though with some state subsidies for certain educational paths and research activity.
Lightweight yet effective and highly competent government... I do think it's possible, and the societies that figure it out will run circles around everyone else.
If someone wants to be a poet, or a historian, or anything else, more power to him. Why on everyone else's money, though?
To be honest, if your calling to become a poet is stopped by a government's funding decision, you wouldn't have made much of a poet anyway.