Yasmin Jayathirtha The school that I am a part of was recently visited by an education official. He looked in on the classes, appreciated the exploratory lessons and the library. Afterwards, talking about the school, he said, “This is all very nice but I am worried about the future of your students. What do they do after their +2 programme? Most of them go on to college, they do BA, B.Sc… BA, what can they do, doing BA?” This disdain for subjects, from a person involved in education was disheartening, and I began to wonder about the attitudes we have towards different subjects. These are not unique to India, and one reads discussions about putting more science, more maths, more poetry, more writing, more history, more Sanskrit depending on what we feel is wrong with the younger generation, what we feel the society needs and what we think the subjects do. For the last 50-60 years, society has become more technological, so science has been on the ascendant. It has been considered important and given more prominence. The developing countries decided that the way to modernization was to emphasize science and technology. This has led to some very piquant situations: Britain, wanting to be like Singapore, wanted to increase math and science classes, Singapore wanting the creativity of Britain, invited educationists to advise them on the so-called soft subjects. A 100 years ago, the preferred subjects would have been the classical languages, literature, grammar, all of which required the use of logic and abstraction, unlike science which emphasized experiments, lab work and observation of the real. The hierarchies seemed to have changed and what is the problem with that? There are several issues that I feel have a direct effect on our lives and that of our children’s. When we glorify the acquisition of knowledge by the mind, whether literature or chemistry, we discount the real learning and skill in working with our hands. We consider the skill of abstraction by the mind as higher than the skill of abstraction by the hands; as in pottery, art and other crafts. Another danger is that it leads to students ranking themselves and others – making them arrogant if they find mind work easy and defeated if they don’t. The third problem is that we narrow ourselves to skills that we feel are on top of the list, are marketable. We want to become engineers, doctors, computer programmers or managers, however insecure we are with our expertise