Back in October 2008, I took part in a debate on just that topic at Cambridge University‘s Festival of Ideas.

It was chaired by Peter Curran and featured Professor John Carey (author of What Good Are the Arts?), Claire Fox, director of the Institute of Ideas, and philosopher Julian Baggini.

The audio is now available here. Go listen!

And here’s the blurb:

What good are the arts? Not a lot compared to science and maths, Adrian Monck, professor of journalism at City University London, told a Festival of Ideas debate on 23 October. He said that we needed more scientists and mathematicians to solve the problems of the 21st century, not people with arts degrees and with difficult decisions being made about funding arts would have to take a back seat.

Philosopher Julian Baggini agreed that there were some difficult funding decisions to be made, but argued that subjects like philosophy had an intrinsic value and Professor John Carey, author of ‘What good are the arts?’, gave an eloquent defence of literature, citing research he had done on using literature with prisoners and how this had boosted their self esteem and made them look at themselves differently.

Claire Fox, director of the Institute of Ideas, gave a passionate defence of arts for arts sake, attacking the Government’s move towards vocationalism and the skills agenda. She spoke, for example, about how music conservatoires had been forced to put pop and other more “accessible” music on the agenda to get more state school pupils in.

She said the reason for state school pupils not getting into conservatoires was because of cuts in music education which meant they didn’t get the right grades in music to get in.

She also spoken about how she had been forced to teach literacy in hairdressing words rather than Shakespeare when she was an FE lecturer. She said the skills agenda was patronising and meant no-one learnt anything of use and argued that they would be far better off studying one academic subject in depth.