STEM subjects aren't all that important for British economy

You can see the thinking. We live in a highly technological age so being clever at techie stuff will be good for you and good for the country. So let’s forget all the arty nonsense and concentrate on the shiny scientific future.

There are however three rather serious flaws with this plan.

The first is that we are actually in the UK already quite good at the “techie stuff”. Oxford, Cambridge and St Andrews universities, to name only a few, are world leaders in research. Britain’s problem is translating that research excellence into economic activity which creates wealth and jobs as well as generates more taxes to fund public services. In part that is because academia and commerce are not as well connected here as they are in some other countries, in part it is a lack of availability of capital to back great ideas and in part it is a cultural issue. Doctor good, Entrepreneur bad.

Making people concentrate on subjects they don’t like and are not very good at is unlikely to create many new science geniuses or giant corporations.

St Andrews university is a world leader in research (Image: free)

Second it is a rather brave policy, to the point of being stupid. Those who regard STEM as what we should be concentrating on and let other subjects die from neglect believe something which is actually rather unlikely to happen. What they are effectively saying is that if we just try a bit harder in these subjects we will be able to square up to the Americans, the Chinese and the Germans – and beat them. Call me pessimistic but this is a staggeringly unlikely outcome.

The third reason though is the key one.

People and policymakers who concentrate on STEM as the golden future implicitly recognise that we are currently in division two in these fields and believe we should try to force our way into division one.

What they do not recognise is that the UK is already remarkably good at certain things but just things other than STEM.

Believe it or not, because we are always told it is rubbish, almost finished, in terminal decline and irrelevant, the UK is a world superpower in certain things. In arts and culture – publishing, books, film, radio, nature, poetry, music, theatre; accountancy, law, consultancy, insurance, education – we are not an also ran but a leader, comparing favourably, right now, with other nations including giants such as the United States and China.

Of the non-religious books with worldwide sales over fifty million, UK authors wrote 23 out of 32. Of the best-selling music artists of all time we have 5 out of the 9 whose sales exceed 250 million. Of the top ten ranked universities in the world 3 are British. We have 2 of the 5 largest dedicated music venues, including the OVO at the SEC in Glasgow. When people in Russia want to know the truth they don’t tune to a Chinese station or the Voice Of America, and certainly not to any Official Russian station, they tune to the BBC.

READ MORE

SNP and its enormous problem with Scottish business

It's not just us: the EU's politics is looking wobbly too

Adam Smith (another Brit) when he wrote The Wealth of Nations made the point, which is still valid today, that nations should concentrate on what they are good at relative to others. For the UK that it not STEM, it is the Arts and Humanities.

Not only should we play to our strengths but many of our strengths have a massive economic advantage which will become increasingly important as times goes on – they are hard to copy.

Anybody can try and might well succeed in building a better and cheaper car but they can’t build a better Shakespeare. Nor could they easily replicate the insurance expertise of Lloyds of London, make better nature films than David Attenborough, be funnier than our comedians or better than our musicians.

By concentrating on STEM we are ignoring our strengths. Your child having the opportunity to learn music, to participate in drama, to get the chance to find out that grasping history is key to understanding the future – these are not just nice-to-haves they are absolutely vital to what we are as a nation and to our future. In our rush to concentrate on STEM we relegate these, actually our strengths, to secondary status.

Of course we should invest in technical subjects but it is not backward-looking nostalgia to invest just as strongly in arts and humanities. We will all be poorer – in every sense – if we do not.