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Ralph Windle’s Blog on Science & The Arts

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ARTS/SCIENCE ‘ENCOUNTERS’: a Review

II     THE WORLD ABOUT US

`It´s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,´ the Queen remarked.
- Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass

Like any visit to the theatre, participation in an unusual and enjoyable `Encounter´ between people from the `arts´ and `sciences´ would not seem to need explanantion or even comment. `Performers´ and `audience´ alike either enjoy the experience or they don’t, and the latter has the ultimate privilege of voting with its feet.

As we are about to see, these particular `performers´ and `audiences´ undoubtedly did enjoy the experience and were very eloquent about it. So – since universities are not, for the most part, in the business of theatrical impresarios - there has to be some wider context of significance for what was happening and why it mattered so much that it should.

And so there was - and is; though little recognised because of our special British genius for hiding important ideas-for-change in relatively obscure reports, with low public visibility but a high potential for dinner discussions at the Royal Society.

Such was the 2001 `Imagination and Understanding´ Report on `the Arts and Humanities in relation to Science and Technology´, prepared for the Prime Minister by the Council for Science and Technology (CST).
(Note that, even so short a time ago, there was not yet an equivalent `Council for Arts and Humanities´ so that the latter were, to coin a phrase, `more reported on than reporting´. This, at least, has since been partially put right).

It was the CST report which, at last, made explicit for us all that –

`in the circumstances of modern society and the modern global economy, the concept of a distinct frontier between science and the arts and humanities is anachronistic. Successful economies depend increasingly on the creation, communication, understanding and use of ideas and images´.

These were useful statements of incontrovertible truths, raising eager expectations of the revolutionary measures to achieve them. For the most part, we still wait; though the report at least helped illuminate the problem, if not the cure….

` The division between the scientific and the literary or artistic cultures has been associated, at least since the 1880s, with the peculiarities of the educational curriculum, especially in England. The capacity to communicate across this division… can be encouraged ( or discouraged) in every phase of our educational system.´

`Discouraged´ mainly – especially in the education of those key aspirants for university, the 15-18 year-olds, which remained -
`highly specialised by comparison with almost all other countries´, and especially with France (Baccalaureate), Germany (Abitur) and the US where `high school education includes required courses in English, social studies, maths (to age 18) science (to age 17)…. Of the 215,000 17 or 18 year-olds who achieved one or more A/AS passes in England in 1999, almost 70% had taken either no science subjects or no arts subjects´.

Sadly, this lucid but troubling analysis was not matched by much conviction about necessary action. The report merely `encouraged´ the government to facilitate a less specialised curriculum; and `urged´ universities to encourage diversity in the secondary school curriculum.

And even this ` encouragement´ of ` these broader programmes of instruction, both in the sciences and in the arts and humanities … need not be based, as in North America, on an extension of requirements´. So could we rely on exhortation alone to take us towards their own (and our) desire for an `Education which is about Understanding and Imagination, as well as about Training and Skills?´ some people asked.

And what of research ?

`Many of the most exciting areas of research lie between and across the boundaries of the traditionally defined disciplines. But the present organisation of research funding … has a number of disadvantages. It is likely to discourage imaginative interdisciplinary research´.

What, too, of the report´s hopes –

`for a more diverse university education and one in which science and technology students have more opportunity to study arts and humanities subjects, and reflect on their own disciplines…?
- and vice- versa for their arts/humanities peers ?

So said the report; and so it is that we now have an upgraded Arts and Humanities Research Council, with a notionally more equal status with its Science colleagues; so why is it that, regretfully, research prescriptions for this new ArtScience interdisciplinary world are, as with the `Education´ for it, still lagging behind the need?

These welcome, more liberated views on a `whole life´ vision for education, which find the `distinct frontier between science and the arts and humanities anachronistic´ spoke in the names of both `society´ and `the modern economy´; but seem to have legislated mainly for the latter, as if the two were at odds with each other. Rhetoric apart, the immediate needs for `training and skills´ seem to have invariably outweighed those of `understanding and imagination´ when the administrative chips were down.

And some pessimists, like distinguished academic Stefan Collini, fear it could become worse under the impact of the new Research Excellence Framework (REF)´s proposed new guidelines for the funding of research in the Humanities. The `closer to market´ style criteria for `impact´, Collini ruefully comments, could have something to do with the fact that `responsibility for higher education is now subsumed into Lord Mandelson´s Department for Business.´ So , how is the Arts, Humanities and Science inter-disciplinary mission likely to fare?