After the playwright Tom Stoppard died in 2015, among the most striking homages to his work came from a scientific researcher. Michael Baum discussed in the British Medical Journal how, in the period of a 1993 performance of Arcadia, he experienced an epiphany. Thomasina Coverly’s attempt to outline the equation for a rose prompted him to realise that chaos theory was the very best way to explain breast cancer’s pattern of reoccurrence. It was, he composed, “the bond that links the arts and the sciences as one business instead of the contents of two silos”.
Mr Baum was not the very first person to celebrate the bridging of this gap. CP Snow notoriously criticised the incuriosity of “literary intellectuals” about innovation in his essay The Two Cultures (later on developed into a lecture and a book). Whether this was validated at the time, numerous literary intellectuals besides Stoppard have since taken a close interest in science; Richard Holmes’s newest book, about the influence of evolutionary theory on Tennyson, is just one example. However the split between the liberal arts and sciences remains noticable, and will appear when this year’s A-level results are launched on Thursday.Stoppard’s Thomasina was talking to her mathematics tutor when she triggered Mr Baum’s chain of associations. For anybody interested in linking disciplines, education is clearly vital. However while recent decades have seen successful efforts to improve Stem(science, innovation, engineering and mathematics), at the expenditure of the humanities and arts, the division between these 2 broad fields of knowledge has actually been unaddressed. So has the problem of early specialisation, with lots of pupils in England and Wales picking either one path or the other at age 16. This constricting is highly unusual globally. In France, Germany, the United States
and Scotland, pupils usually study a wider curriculum till they leave school. And while theoretically, English and Welsh teens a minimum of have a large choice of subjects, and there is nothing to stop them from studying chemistry alongside dance or German, timetables can make this challenging, while the competitive nature of university admissions incentivises them to adhere to what they are best at, whether that is a suite of essay-writing subjects or physics, maths and further maths.This propensity to specialise has actually heightened recently. Under New Labour, pupils were motivated to take four subjects in year 12 before picking 3 A-levels. However following Michael Gove’s choice to scrap AS assessments, the options narrowed both in regards to the number of subjects studied and the variety. In between 2003 and 2021, the percentage of students taking A-levels from a single subject-group increased from 18 %to 35%. Just 5%of the latter cohort studied a combination of Stem, social science and liberal arts subjects. Last year the government cut funding for state schools teaching the wide‑ranging global baccalaureate.There is no scarcity of difficulties facing the new education secretary, Lucy Powell– not least the consistently bungled reform of employment alternatives, and the increase in pupils with special academic needs. That’s one reason that A-levels barely featured in the current curriculum review. But the 70th anniversary of Snow’s” 2 cultures “thesis is a good time to reflect on whether a rethink of 16-to-18 education is due. Young people must be allowed to keep more choices open for longer. More people straddling the science and humanities disciplines would be a good idea.