‘The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude’ - George Orwell.
I’m sure the arts students among us have all been there - apprehensively awaiting essay feedback only to read ‘not enough AO2’, or ‘AO4 is sometimes being conflated with AO3’ scrawled across the page. We’ve come to accept this as the norm, but if we step back and consider the situation - what on earth is going on?! What is going so wrong in teaching and marking that a student’s authentic response to culture can receive such a crassly utilitarian response as that? Are critics allowed to define a novel’s calibre in terms of categorising the author’s literary techniques into bullet points? The notion would be as freakish as Mark Corrigan’s social competence.
Now before the frondeurs pipe up, obviously there is some sense in mark schemes - without them, essays couldn’t be moderated, exam specifications would be vague and essays wouldn’t be fairly marked. But arguably they’re not being marked fairly as it is. Instead of teaching students to write detailed, imaginative and insightful essays, we are being taught to counter the foibles of the mark scheme; and in many cases, this obsession with sticking to the examiners’ demands results in far poorer quality essays.
Students struggling are handed out templates with which to craft their essays, lumping in contrived quotes and critics (as per the examiner’s autocratic requirements), clunky and restrictive imperatives, which signal a cynicism and lack of respect for students, who should perhaps be left to decide independently, whether an analysis of audience reception (for example) would strengthen their argument.
The cynicism provoked by such mechanical awarding of points, and this keenness to categorise every essay (essays which by nature, should be elusive and difficult to pin down - that’s why they take up pages) is also problematic as it suggests there is a lack of faith in the examiners to recognise and differentiate good essays.
On the other end of the spectrum, as the Guardian’s anonymous ‘secret teacher’ remarked in 2015, excellent responses ‘go uncredited if they do not fit the exacting standard of the mark scheme’. Smells like mean spirit to me.
This fixation with mark schemes in a bid to pin down arts subjects, displayed by schools and examiners alike, is slowly undermining the purpose of studying humanities. Subjects like English, Art and Languages don’t directly lead to careers (to the dismay of my parents apropos my university applications), and are instead an opportunity for students to respond to culture, a discipline nebulous by its nature, which doesn’t evolve in measurable lines and thus surely can’t correspond to the regimented assimilation advocated by the exam boards’ lifeless, robotic exactitude.
If cultural advances are to happen at all, they will increasingly happen outside the walls of schools, where genuine creativity is being stifled and schemes and templates are being pushed to the forefront of modern education. It really is down to young people to push for freedom of intellectual endeavour, because if our academic institutions stop being educationally innovative, which institutions will? The catastrophic repercussions of this loss would rival those of the Brockman family’s encounter with Andy Murray.
Yet perhaps this educational catastrophe and loss of intellectual direction is only part of Britain’s crisis of political identity. The Conservatives’ Dolores-Umbridge-ian policies (pushed through by Gavin Williamson) which have seen them lacerate funding for the arts over the last few years, demonstrate their reticence to endorse courses which don’t immediately generate wealth and success. More recently, Rishi Sunak’s proposals to gradually eliminate degrees which don’t ‘increase earning potential’, have prompted Sheffield Hallam, Roehampton and Cumbria universities to slice arts funding, a back-stabbing backhand which would impress Roger himself.
The withdrawal from a commitment to the arts is an issue by no means confined to British borders; two years ago a higher education reform package was announced in Australia, increasing university tuition fees for arts students in an attempt to endorse ‘job-relevant’ courses. The government (under Scott Morrison’s centre-right coalition) proposed a 113% rise in fees for history students, while maths and agriculture course fees would decline by 62%. And if that wasn’t enough, Australian music funding is set to drop 20% across the next two years, and funding to the National Library of Australia will fall a third by 2026.
Lucrative STEM courses are justifiably lauded for their importance - I’m not trying to argue that a study of Mediaeval linguistics would have helped create a Covid vaccine - but Australia's government, just like our own, is using its ostensible preference for more profitable STEM courses as a means to veil its actual aim: to render dismal the study of creative subjects, where shoving in your ‘declaratives’ has become the key to academic success.
This effort to dehumanise the study of creative subjects, this desperation to pin literature and art down into objective truths, to me represents a fear on the part of our government and others, who are deliberately attacking the axioms of freedom of creativity and autonomous thought. As Orwell astutely noted, “If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.” In all areas of society, from advertisements to reality TV, from celebrity culture to fast fashion, our ability to ‘think well’ is being affronted.
And although this may seem far-fetched to some of you, consider the front bench: a row of hypocritical, bombastic, prattling, ‘super serviceable, finical rogues’ (to quote my favourite Earl of Kent). These really are people who want a society created in their likeness, a society that will continue voting for populists, quash its intellectual honesty and repress its liberty of thought.
Because if the values of empathy and humanness are too soppy for any cold-blooded mercenaries reading this, in today’s atomised political climate, one of the greatest gifts we can gain from studying humanities is critical thinking.
New generations of independent thinkers, who can express themselves with warmth and sensitivity, are in high demand - and spoon feeding students the material of subjects which are meant to be intensely personal, and advocating study based on monetary gain, are the first steps in which our individuality and ability to evaluate and formulate our own opinions are being assailed.
As Keats insisted, if we learn from each other, ‘every human being might become great’ - the proliferation of creativity will elevate humanity from a ‘heath’ to ‘a grand democracy of forest trees’. But my faith that the status quo will transform any time soon is as feeble as Bieber’s lyrical vocabulary, and I fear the attack on creative subjects, albeit so far displayed through Britain’s unwaveringly pedantic mark schemes and funding cuts, has only just begun.
Clearly 14 years of schooling has done it for me; as my favourite Weasley brothers memorably said: ‘I think we’ve outgrown full-time education… time to test our talents in the real world, d’you reckon?’.
© Bea Wood
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