Mickey mouse

The tories are very keen that what they call ‘mickey mouse degrees’ be abolished, in favour of apprenticeships. At first blush, this seems to be just a depressing utilitarian idea. But then it seems at first rather odd, and then not odd at all.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me

‘Mickey mouse degree’ is meant to make you think that the degrees they want to do away with are somehow valueless. The degrees they are talking about, of course, are more usually known as ‘arts degrees’.

Well, if your only measure of value is how much money you make for your employers, perhaps some arts degrees do have lower value than some other degrees. And this is the kind of grey utilitarian world the tories would like you to think we should all be living in: a world where all that matters is money, especially money in the pockets of people who already have a great deal of it. A world where the serfs’ only reason to exist is the acquisition of money for themselves and, mostly, for their feudal superiors. A world in which art for art’s sake, or education for education’s sake has no value or meaning. A world made of only money.

Do you want to live in that world? If you do we cannot be friends: you should stop reading and go and count your money. Because I think that there is quite a lot more to living a good life than the acquisition of money.

Curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth

Of course if you look even slightly at the numbers, like a good utilitarian would, you’ll find that the arts, to which all those people with ‘mickey mouse’ degrees contribute, make up quite a lot of the economy.

Perhaps the tories are just too stupid to have realised this? I mean, they don’t call them the stupid party for nothing, I suppose?

It gets stranger.

The very people pushing this idiocy are people with PPE degrees: degrees in politics, philosophy and economics. Which means, of course, degrees in the easy parts of three notoriously bullshit-ridden subjects. If these degrees weren’t awarded by Oxford there would be a name for them, and that name would be ‘mickey mouse degrees’. But somehow because the institution which grants these degrees is hundreds of years old this makes them OK. Really, it does.

And the same people putting forward this stupidity then turn out to be very keen on ‘christian values’. Aren’t christian values rather opposed to the whole ‘money is all that matters’ thing? Who was it who said

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. — Mark 10:25

again? Yes, of course, I know, ‘christian values’ is code for ‘white male supremacy’ when tories talk about it, and nothing to do with what the person quoted above actually said. But still, really, this makes no sense.

And shall we talk about their plan to suppress sex education? How does this relate to the whole utilitarian thing? Good sex education means fewer teenage pregnancies and means all the people who are now not looking after babies at 16 can be off earning important money. There is plenty of evidence that good sex education helps people, and that suppressing it will lead to bad results for them. For one thing good sex education means fewer people get sexually assaulted and raped: I suppose tories just don’t worry about that sort of thing.

But, well, yet again it’s all quasi-religious bigotry: sex baad, gay people very baad, trans people extremely baad. We must not teach tiny innocent children about these baad things.

This just makes no sense, at all, to a utilitarian.

What about the free market? Wasn’t this something tories were once rather keen on? If ‘mickey mouse’ degrees leave people worse off, then surely the invisible hand of the market will sort it all out, and there will be fewer of these degrees offered? Or is that not how it works now: don’t we believe in free market capitalism any more?

What about the whole personal freedom thing that conservatives claim to be so keen on. If a person chooses to do a ‘mickey mouse’ degree and thus, presumably, impoverish themselves, shouldn’t that be, you know, their choice? I mean, it’s not even a particularly controversial choice: it’s not as if they’re making the sort of choice that people shouldn’t be allowed to make, like who they want to have sex with, what pronouns they want to use or any of those baad frightening things that Cannot Be Allowed.

And finally, again, arts-related activity turns out to be a rather big deal economically, and a lot of this activity is due to people with, well, ‘mickey mouse’ degrees.

So none of this makes any sense at all. On the one hand there’s all this grey utilitarian awfulness, and on the other there’s quasi-religous fruitcakery. What is going on?

Surely the darkness shall cover me

It is all pretty simple. There are two reasons for this proposal.

The first is that the tories know who votes for them. And the people who vote for them tend to be old and poorly-educated.

We know something about old people: they don’t care about young people, except insofar as they can serve their narrow interests. This includes their own children and grandchildren. And, insofar as they are interested at all, they tend not to understand young people either, and they’re frightened of things they don’t understand. So all these frightening young people doing degrees which aren’t either directly related to making even more money for old people who have done better out of the last half-century than young people ever will, or to training slaves carers for them in their dotage, why, those things must be stopped. All that matters is old people.

We know something about poorly-educated people: they’re often jealous og people who have been lucky enough to get a better education than they had. That jealousy is actually justified, and the solution is better educational opportunities for older people. But that’s complicated to arrange and involves admitting that there are a lot of people who would have benefited from more and better education. A simpler solution is just to reduce the number of young people getting good educations. It’s hard to argue that education in at least the more applicable parts of science and engineering should be suppressed (I expect that someone, somewhere, is arguing that degrees in pure maths and theoretical physics should be discouraged). But all those ‘mickey mouse’ subjects: we can stop people doing degrees in those, which will solve the jealousy problem by reducing the general level of educational attainment. That’s a terrible solution to the problem, but it is a solution.

The second is that the tories know who votes for them. And they know who doesn’t vote for them.

The people who vote for them tend to be poorly-educated, and certainly don’t have education in subjects which encourage independent thought.

People with higher educational attainment are less likely to vote for the tories. So the tories have a direct interest in people having lower educational attainment: if they are to remain in power, or as now seems likely, to have a chance of returning to power in due course, they need to try and make sure that voters don’t have too much education. Again, it’s hard for them to suppress education in applied sciences, but it’s much easier to suppress it in the arts, particularly as people with arts degrees are probably especially likely to be socially liberal, questioning of authority, and generally thorns in the sides of would-be authoritarians.

And so, ‘mickey mouse’ degrees must be burned at the alter of our glorious and rightful hereditary leaders the tory party.

Notes

This was written well before the 2024 election. Unfortunately I forgot to publish it. Whatever the tories thought or think is, we must all hope, a lot less important now.

I have a degree in a science subject.

There will probably be one more post after this one: after that I think I’m done shouting into the void.