Utilitarian barbarians at the gates

[nmg]

According to today's Guardian, Charles Clarke, the education secretary, has attacked the principle of public funding for "ornamental" HE disciplines such as medieval studies (having already said much the same about classics) on the grounds "that universities exist to enable the British economy and society to deal with the challenges posed by the increasingly rapid process of global change". So farewell to learning for learning's sake, hello to more vocational courses (and dare I say it, Mickey Mouse degrees, as Margaret Hodge would term them).

(the Times Higher broke the story, while Tristram Hunt has a good comment piece in the Guardian)

So ias, my little ornament, I'm sure you're dying to rant on this...

Comments

[nmg.livejournal.com]

You cannot say 'here begins history, anything before it did not happen and has no bearing on what has happened since history began'.

Or more worryingly, "*this* is what happened (there can be no other interpretation of these events, and so no need for a historian to understand or interpret those events)".