What’s the Value of Teaching Art in Schools?

Reversing the anti-art mindset

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For the past thirty years I have had a recurring bad dream which comes to me every so often when I’m feeling really worried or I’ve got an important deadline looming. It’s always the same. In this dream I’m 16 years old and I’m sitting in a maths exam. The clock is ticking and my mind is frozen. I’m staring blankly at the numbers on the exam paper in front of me and I’m trying to get my brain in gear to work out the formulae and calculate the equations before time runs out. But the sums are like double Dutch and I can’t do it. I always wake up in a cold sweat from that dream.

Maths was the subject I struggled with the most at school. I just didn’t enjoy it at all. It was anxiety-inducing. And it was a huge relief to me when I was no longer required to study it. So it was a hard ‘no!’ from me last week when the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak suggested that studying maths should be compulsory for all young people until the age of 18. Sunak wants to reverse what he sees as an ‘anti-maths’ mindset in the UK because he says there’s ‘a cultural sense…