The yearning for learning

Meanwhile, the much-maligned subject of encouraging more young people to enter the UK’s composites manufacturing industry continues to raise its head, and can be guaranteed to raise the blood pressure too, in many a heated debate.

And yet still more teenagers head out into the big, wide world – many either electing to enrol on non-vocational courses until their ‘life experiences’ point them down the path of true calling, whilst others – whose school grades didn’t exactly set the world alight – pile into the local college to ply their trades as hairdressers. As if we haven’t got enough of them already.

Just how hard are these students of the arts and of the hairdryer for that matter, pushed and tested during the long years of study, one wonders? My son is currently studying for an engineering-based degree at Loughborough University and regularly laments the amounts of additional studying and revision time he puts in compared to an English literature student for example.

It seems to me that arts graduates are trained for nothing particularly vocational and yet continue to find employment managing - often very badly - organisations where the engineering and science employees do the actual work. And it’s often likely that after a calamitous business decision made by one of these arts graduates that it’s left to the scientists and engineers to solve the problems they’ve created. After all, it’s what we’re trained to do.

Mike Richardson, editor