The Chairman of Google Deplores Drift to the Humanities in U.K. Education

The Two Cultures is the title of an influential 1959 Rede Lecture by British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow. Its thesis was that the breakdown of communication between the two cultures of modern society – the sciences and the humanities – was a major hindrance to solving the world’s problems. As a trained scientist who was also a successful novelist, Snow was well placed to articulate this thesis.

This is how C.P. Snow summed up his position:

“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something that is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?

Last week, half a century later, Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google, made a similar statement in the annual MacTaggart lecture in Edinburgh at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh international TV festival. He noted a drift to the humanities in U.K education and attacked the emergence of two educational camps, each of which denigrates the other. “To use what I’m told is the local vernacular,” he said, “you’re either a luvvy or a boffin…. Over the past century, the U.K. has stopped nurturing its polymaths. You need to bring art and science back together.”

Schmidt said Britain should look to the “glory days” of the Victorian era for reminders of how the two disciplines can work together.

“It was a time when the same people wrote poetry and built bridges,” he said. “Lewis Carroll didn’t just write one of the classic fairytales of all time. He was also a mathematics tutor at Oxford. James Clerk Maxwell was described by Einstein as among the best physicists since Newton – but was also a published poet.”

Schmidt paid tribute to Britain’s record of innovation, saying the U.K. had “invented computers in both concept and practice” before observing that the world’s first office computer “was built in 1951 by the Lyons chain of teashops.”

However, he said the U.K. had failed to build industry-leading positions or successfully transfer ideas from the drawing board to the boardroom.

“The U.K. is the home of so many media-related inventions. You invented photography. You invented TV,” he said. “Yet today, none of the world’s leading exponents in these fields are from the U.K.” He added: “Thank you for your innovation, thank you for your brilliant ideas. You’re not taking advantage of them on a global scale.”

He said British startups tended to sell out to overseas companies once they had reached a certain size, and that this trend needed to be reversed. “The U.K. does a great job of backing small firms and cottage industries, but there’s little point getting a thousand seeds to sprout if they are then left to wither or are transplanted overseas. U.K. businesses need championing to help them grow into global powerhouses, without having to sell out to foreign-owned companies. If you don’t address this, then the U.K. will continue to be where inventions are born, but not bred for long-term success.”

Schmidt said the country that invented the computer was “throwing away your great computer heritage” by failing to teach programming in schools. “I was flabbergasted to learn that today computer science isn’t even taught as standard in U.K. schools,” he said. “Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it’s made.”

Source: The Guardian