Removing funding from university arts courses signals that they don’t matter. Ministers couldn’t be more wrong
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” With the final couplet of his poem, John Keats – who died 200 years ago in Rome, aged 25 – offered one of the enduring definitions of beauty in English literature, in words he imagined spoken by a Greek urn more than 2,000 years old. Not every student is a reader of romantic poetry. But learning to think about what is beautiful, and why, is one of the purposes of education.
Such lessons are not only learned via the arts: sports, science and maths too provide opportunities for aesthetic appreciation. But the facility of creative expression through dance, music, theatre and visual arts is part of what it means to be human, and has been since the earliest cave paintings. Though the sector contributed £112bn to the economy in 2018, it is the conviction that the arts are of fundamental importance to civilisation, more than a wish to promote the businesses that monetise these talents, that animates the reaction against plans to cut funding to arts courses (along with media studies and archaeology) at English universities.
