Is University Teaching Useful

　　When young people who want to be journalists ask me what subject they should study after leaving school asks me what subject they should study after leaving school, I tell them: most veterans of my trade would say the same.

　　It is practical advice. For obviously reasons, newspaper editors like to employ people who can bring something other than knowledge of the media to the party that we call our work.

　　On the daily telegraph, for example, the editor of London spy is a philosopher. The editor of our student magazine, juice, studied physics. As for myself, I read history, ancient and modern, at the taxpayer's expense.

　　I am not sure what Charles Clarke, the education secretary, would make of all this. If I understand him correctly, he would think that the public money spent on teaching this huge range of disciplines to the staff of the daily telegraph was pretty much wasted. the only academic course of which he would wholeheartedly approve in the list above would be physics_-but then again, he would probably think it a terrible waste that Simon Hogg chose to edit juice instead of designing aeroplanes or building nuclear reactors. by that, he seems to mean that everything taught at the public expense should have a direct, practical application that will benefit society and the economy.

　　It is extremely alarming that the man in charge of Britain's education system should think in this narrow-minded, half-witted way. The truth, of course, is that all academic disciplines benefit society and the economy, whether in a direct and obviously way or not. They teach student to think -to process in formation and to distinguish between what is important and unimportant, true and untrue. Above all, a country in which academic research and intelligent ideas are allowed to flourish is clearly a much more interesting, stimulating and enjoyable place than one without "ornament", in which money and useless are that count.

　　Mr. Clarke certainly has a point when he says that much of what is taught in Britain's universities is useless. But it is useless for a far more serious reason than that it lacks any obvious economic utility. As the extraordinary high drop-out rate testifies, it is useless because it fails the first test of university teaching-that is should stimulate the interest of those being taught. When student themselves think that course are a waste of time and money, then a waste they are.

　　The answer is not to cut off state funding for the humanities. It is to offer short, no-nonsense vocational course to those who want to learn a trade, and reserve university places for those who want pursue an academic discipline. By a great deal of wasted money could be saved and all students-the academic and the not-so-academic-would benefit. What Mr. Clarke seems to be proposing instead is an act of culture vandalism that would rob Britain of all claim of is called a civilized country?