In an academic environment increasingly dependent on the goodwill of a reluctant government I couldn't help feeling it was apt to share this extract from Charles Bernstein's The Consequence of Innovation. The chapter is on the nature of poetics and is an interesting read. Even if it's not something you want to do a degree in, liberal arts and humanities are likely to be something that you have at some point in your life actively engaged in. They allow us to explore beyond our material self, think critically and engage with the world and become part of a universal discourse. Successive governments haven't wanted the majority to be a part of that discourse so they have done their best to cripple arts funding and teaching.
“The greatest benefit
of the university is not that it trains students for anything in particular,
nor that it imbues in them a particular set of ideas, but that it is a place
for open-ended research that can just as well lead nowhere as somewhere, that
is wasteful and inefficient by short term socioeconomic standards but is practically
a steal as a long-term research and development investment in democracy,
freedom, and creativity – without which we won't have much of an economic
future or the one we have won't be worth the flesh it's imprinted on... We cannot
make education more efficient without making it more deficient.” ~ Charles Bernstein, The Consequence of Innovation p. 53
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| Graffiti on the wall of a bus stop in Penryn, Cornwall. |
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