Academic and non-academic subjects

One of the worst things that happened in education in the 2000s was a seeming reduction in the number of academic subjects. MFL ceased to be compulsory, and some perverse changes in the league tables gave schools an incentive to concentrate on vocational qualifications. In the last few years, particularly with the introduction of the Ebacc and other changes in league table measures, efforts have been made to reverse this. During some of the debates it became clear how divisive it can be to refer to some subjects as “academic” and yet this is something we do quite easily, often without thinking what we mean.

If I had to put into words what I mean when I describe a subject as “academic”, I’d say an academic subject was one where mastery of it was best characterised by further study. The people who are best at history, are historians and they study history; the people who are best at maths are mathematicians, and they study maths, and so on. This immediately creates a distinction between those subjects and some others, where mastery is shown in carrying out a particular activity or skill. We consider the people who are best at football to be footballers. We expect the people who are best at acting to be actors. We consider the people who are best at plumbing to be plumbers. We don’t expect to find these people, who are the best at their subject, to be employed at universities doing research into those subjects. That doesn’t mean you can’t study these things at a university, but the academic study of the subject would be seen as distinct from being the best at the subject, in a way that wouldn’t happen with history or maths.

Once you make this distinction, then you find a few difficult cases. Are the people with the greatest mastery in the field of music those who play music or those who study it? Similarly, who has the greatest mastery of a language? People who speak it, people who write it or people who study it? This leaves some doubt both about how academic MFL is, although probably not classical languages, and also some parts of what is studied in English lessons. In these cases it could be argued either way about whether the subject is academic, or whether parts of it are and parts of it aren’t. Perhaps the best option in those cases is to consider them as subjects that could be taught more or less academically while still being equally focused on some form of mastery of that subject. Whereas in other subjects, we could be more or less academic but there is no dispute as to whether mastery is shown by further study or not. Artists are the best at art; carpenters are the best at woodwork, and nobody would expect a university to be the first place to find them and this contrasts clearly with where we’d find the people who are best at biology and ancient Greek.

Even if you can understand the logic of the distinction I have made, some people are likely to still be furious. The problem is that the place of a subject within schools is often based on how academic it seems. Therefore, even if it seems obvious that football and drama are not the same sort of thing as Latin and physics people will not want to make that distinction. And that’s actually part of the problem here, people will want to make them as much like an academic discipline as possible. They will want budding footballers and actors to have written essays and compiled coursework that has been given a grade, because that’s what academic subjects look like; that’s the route to credibility and legitimacy in those subjects.

It’s also a mistake.

We need to create a culture in schools where the best drama teaching isn’t that which produces the best grades at GCSE or (God forbid) performing arts BTECs, but the one that results in the best actors. A great school production should be seen as a sign of great drama teaching. The school with the best PE teaching is probably not the one where the PE qualifications make the biggest contribution to the league tables, it’s going to be one where their sports teams win and their students have the best chance of becoming professionals in the sports they learnt at school. We need to let arts, sports and crafts be valued in schools as arts, sports and crafts not as pseudo-academic subjects. Being good at football, art or woodwork should not be about getting qualifications, they should be about playing a game, painting or producing a product. Conversely, we should try to stop people making serious academic disciplines into games or entertainment; stop trying to put creativity into maths while taking it out of pottery.

The distinction between academic subjects and non-academic subjects is not a distinction between what is important and what isn’t; it’s a distinction between the ways in which they are important. The arts in particular, are in many ways so much more important than the sciences, that it seems insane to treat them as sciences. I’d love it if the incentives were there so that schools could simultaneously reduce the number of qualifications taken in non-academic subjects, but increase the resources put into those subjects, because the cultural life of a school is as important as exam results. We need to make a distinction between academic subjects and non-academic subjects for the sake of both types of subject.