Why humanities?

The more the humanities become subjects for the elite, the more inward looking and bigoted the rest of the population will become. If you want a vibrant multicultural democracy with well-rounded and contented citizens which is well integrated into the rest of the world, you have to properly fund the liberal arts and encourage those from all social backgrounds to study them.

Education was divided into two classes, one for the aristocracy, the other for the destitute and impoverished. We called the former free education, for it taught the freeman what a thing was (a peculiar and valuable knowledge); the later was called trade or indentured service; it taught a pleb how to perform some economically useful task, made him feel jolly and highly skilled but kept him in ignorance of the finer truths.

Employers prefer a mediocre business studies degree to a good humanities one these days. That's not because business studies or its students are superior, but because people not au fait with humanities (a group set to grow and grow) just don't understand the skills they impart.

Why would you encourage the perpetuation of poverty by enticing poor students into doing history or even more uselessly English (can you not already read and write decent English?)

The bigger worry for our society is that the field of journalism is dominated by those with an upper class background.

The choice by the rich reflects the later salary expectations. Science and technology are low class jobs and have lower salary expectations in the UK and the rich realize that. Computing is not particularly well paid with many jobs being outsourced to India and age discrimination is particularly rife in computing which the rich will know. Dentistry and medicine have extremely high salary expectations which is why they are favoured by the rich.

The figures for medicine and dentistry are the ones which make me wonder. Are you really telling me that so many students from wealthy backgrounds choose these subjects because they are interested in anatomy and teeth? Or just because they value money, prestige and security...? And if the latter, can we really blame them? It seems an awful waste for talented people to do something they don't enjoy much, in order to have a secure, well paid job, but these days it seems ever more common. And yet with ever-increasing work hours, who really has time for hobbies?

We're already well on the way to being a society dominated by mediciocre busininess administrators and philistine politicians (both of whom increasingly resemble each other) who have no sense of history, aesthetics, ethics or anything else that enhances the quality of life, and can't use language with any precision at all, resorting to hype and spin.