When the Arts-Science divide becomes government policy

The arts-science divide used to be a thing in British universities. The artsy (humanities and languages) undergraduates looked down on the nerdy scientists, and the scientists considered themselves a good deal brighter than the average arts student. That divide began to fade when even artsy students began to regard nerdiness as cool and respectable thanks to Bill Gates and the dotcom bubble of the 1990s.

Even before that the divide had begun to blur with the growing popularity of the social sciences . Subject fields grew up which combined the old humanities with scientific enquiry. Nowadays it is hard to say where economics, psychology, anthropology or geography would sit in the old arts/science divide. The rise and rise of joint honours degrees and combinations like physics with philosophy or engineering with Chinese have further smudged the edges.

But now the old division has returned with a vengeance, with the UK governments’ proposal to fund the old STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) from taxes as part of its review of higher education funding, while leaving the humanities wholly dependent on fees charged to students.

Humanities students could, under current proposals end up paying £6000-£9000a year for an undergraduate degree, while Scientists may have lower fees, subsidized by government funding.

The arts-science divide has suddenly remerged in sharp focus. All learning is not equal. The arts and humanities are being divided again, this time by the monetary value put on them by policymakers.

Some humanities students have seen the writing on the wall already. Many try to hedge their bets by combining history, say, with economics or business in order to increase their earning power in a market that is saturated with humanities graduates but values economics and finance. That they do this at all shows a pragmatism about the humanities and the sciences that simply did not exist in the era when ne’er the twain would meet.

Those who have watched these trends over decades say there is no doubt that there will be a shift towards the sciences at undergraduate level if the current proposals become policy. The surplus in humanities graduates will soon disappear, and we could see some not very motivated science students, mainly intent on getting an affordable first degree rather than pursuing science. The big shifts from the pure sciences into economics and business degrees that occurred in the 1990s could well be reversed in the scramble for an affordable degree.

So where will this new divide take us? There could be some creative solutions such as new hybrid degrees that compromise funding with inclination for the humanities – chemistry with history, mathematics with law, for example, so that the chemistry and mathematics part will be taken in subsidized ‘science’ departments and perhaps reduce the cost of a full degree.

Or will courses like Psychology and Geography become ‘sciences’ with more modules of biology in Psychology and more geophysics in geography in order to qualify for government money and attract more students?

And who will teach the humanities in schools? Will there be enough good, inspirational English and history teachers who genuinely passionate about their subjects? The situation where economics graduates are hired to teach maths A level because of a shortage of maths teachers may become a thing of the past. In 30 years time we may either be importing history teachers from other countries, or history will be taught in schools by people with a maths degree topped up with a year max of history training.

Interesting that this should be happening at a time when China and Singapore have realised that they may have overemphasized the sciences, and that to have good managers and civil servants they need to develop the teaching of humanities and social sciences in their universities. They see the limitations of technocratic management. Singapore has invited in Yale University to set up a liberal arts campus. Hong Kong's universities are shifting to four-year degrees so that students can get a strong grounding in the liberal arts in their first year, before specialising.

The real problem, whether in Britain or Asia, is the huge difference in attitudes towards the humanities on the one hand and the sciences on the other by governments and policy makers. What we really need is a mixture of both and of individuals passionate about their chosen subject rather than forced by economic circumstances or government diktat to chose another calling.

Those Who Benefit Should Pay

Or Why Every Employer Should Pay a Graduate Levy

Whatever figure emerges from the bruising political battle ahead to set the level of fees at universities in England, whether it is £5,000, £7,000 or, God forbid £10,000 a year, it is clear that the overriding guiding principle now is that the individual, as the main beneficiary of degree-level education, should be the one who pays for it.


There is no longer even lip service paid to education for its own sake. Even the 1990s argument of an educated population contributing to higher GNP, and a more competitive economy, particularly as Europe and America watched the rise and rise of the Asian economies, seems dated.

But there are several problems with the user-pays principle. The first is that as more and more young people have degrees – and in countries like the US, Sweden and Finland the figure is approaching 70%, the measurable benefit to the individual, the so-called lifetime earnings premium, has been going down.

T he previous British Government under Tony Blair based its arguments for a fee hike in 2005 on the amount a graduate can earn over a lifetime compared to a non-graduate as calculated by the OECD. The OECD estimates were based on the lifetime earnings premium for graduates during the 1970s-1990s, which were already out of date by 2005. The OECD has not been keen to publicise the rapidity with which that premium is declining in post-industrial economies, but at least, in its latest Education at a Glance 2010 snapshot of education indicators, it now admits that it has decreased in Britain, Sweden and New Zealand.

The lifetime earnings premium, while relatively high in the US and UK is much, is much lower in countries like Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand and Norway - countries. Could that be because they are more egalitarian societies, where the salary of the lowest paid and the highest paid are not so wide apart, than because their degrees are worth so much less? It is also possible that lifetime earnings figures are skewed by large numbers of highly paid people in financial centres such as London and New York. The point is that the difference in graduate and non-graduate earnings over a lifetime are based on more than the possession of a degree itself. The OECD acknowledges that when it says than the premium for women is a whole lot lower than for men. Yet no one is arguing there should be fee-discounts for women students.

As the premium declines, there may well be a time when it is almost negligible, compared to the cost of a degree itself. This has already happened in England for male humanities graduates. Yet you can bet your bottom dollar, university fees will continue to go up and up even as the earnings premium goes down. Even if the government has to justify hikes by relating fees to earnings premiums, universities do not. They want to get as much as they can, any way they can. They want the power to levy their own fees, and they want it now.

There is another problem with the user pays principle. As more jobs which previously did not require degree level qualifications – nursing in particular comes to mind – now require an increasingly expensive degree; and as the cost of education and training is transferred from companies and employers to the institutions, the user-payment burden is skewed strongly and unfairly towards the individual forced to take out bigger and bigger loans against future earnings.

Employers are saving an awful lot of money on training and in-house education. They may argue that they pay in the form of higher salaries for graduates, but it is clear it has become harder to move up the career ladder without paying for a qualification upgrade yourself. The rise and rise of the MA and now the second masters or mid-career MA testifies to that.

Graduates know about the dearth in training only too well, because those companies who do provide fantastic entry-level training programmes are the most sought after of all with 100s of applicants per place and rising. Employers have been able to get away with this for some time because of the ease with which they can hire from overseas, fully trained, and probably more experience for a lower salary than domestic graduates.

Everyone pays taxes that go towards universities, even if their own children do not attend. Those who do attend pay a great deal, financed by loans. That sounds about right when you consider that all of society benefits from universities. But who gets off scott-free? It is the employers of course. The biggest beneficiaries, including banks, multinationals and oil companies, who not only save shed-loads on educating managerial talent, but also shiploads on research and development carried out by universities.

While increasingly transferring their responsibilities for education and training onto the state and the individual and for more and more jobs – even the receptionist has a degree these days - employers have not been ask to stump up their fair share of the cost of higher education. Every single company – and yes, even charities and government departments – should be asked to pay a levy for every graduate they hire. And that levy should be divvied up to universities who in turn would use it to subsidise fee levels.

Then, and then only, will it be fair to say those who benefit most from higher education, pay the most.

The Family that Sees Everything Four Times

We are a four-computer family, a ‘big computer’ for mum and dad (dad also has a PC at work) a laptop for when one of us is working away from home, and laptops for the two teenage kids. And obviously, when it comes to mobile phones, we’re a four-mobile family. Stands to reason: how else would we keep in touch with each other?


We’d have four MP3 players if you count the ones on our phones, ditto cameras. We don’t have four TV sets, but I know families that do. But hey, we have hundreds of books.

And that in a nutshell sums up the e-book reader problem. Am I likely to fork out four times for an iPad/Kindle/Sony Reader just so that our family of four can all read books, magazines and newspapers whenever we want? Not on your life!

Imagine for a moment the young family, intent on giving their children the best start in life, board books, lift-the-flap-books, picture books:

‘Scuse me, dad, can I borrow your iPad so that baby Tom can read the enhanced e-book version (including embedded audio and video) of ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’?

And the battles that might rage. ‘Oy Tom! Gi’s back the iPad. Daddy wants to read the Financial Times .’

At what age will kids ‘come of age’ and have their own readers? Like the age of driving a car, it will be a relief to parents when they don’t depend on you for their reading material. It’ll bring a whole new meaning to the term ‘independent reader’.

Then imagine the social self-searching about when will be the best age to graduate to your very own device. Writers of ‘How to Bring Up Children’ will have whole chapters on it. Will the e-book reader stack up alongside the owner-occupied laptop and bedroom TV as pre-teen must-haves? Will the age at which they get their own become younger and younger till baby Tom has his to giggle at? It might even be a dinky-sized baby version with large print and brighter colours, all neatly framed in a powder-blue console, dangling from the bonnet of his pram. Manufacturers are always quick to spot a gap in the market.

And that’s just the thin end of the wedge. What happens when some publishers begin to insist that certain books will only be available as ebooks? Like the elderly people who can’t get information because it has all gone online, those without ebook readers will be disenfranchised.

Electronic versions of books are not just about the book. It is about reading. And reading is not like listening to music or watching videos. It is not simply a matter of choice.

Simply put, if everything shifts to electronic formats and we don’t keep up with the hardware, we will be forced to queue up to read on whatever ebook reader is available. Like queues for food, who in the civilised world will stomach that?

Stuff and Nonsense

Or How Much Do You Need to Know

Graduates pop out of the University sausage factory, clutching their certificates, and weeping with the exhaustion of juggling a 20 hour job to pay for courses that cost as much as a family starter-home, while slogging to get a First, without which you cannot be short-listed for any decent job. But employers (what a demanding bunch they are!) still insist that graduates these days know very little Stuff.
That is nonsense. Graduates have never known enough Stuff.
It seems the problem is getting worse, because in the internet age, employers have realised how much Stuff is out there, a whole Googleful of Stuff, several internet universes and galaxies of it.
Stuff is what is all around you and happening all the time. You can never know all of it because it is constantly changing, there is new Stuff every day.
Employers want graduates to apply their specialist knowledge to new Stuff. In some quarters (the high tech industries) this is known as 'innovation'. But in most service-oriented companies such as banks, it means that young recruits must hold their own at a cocktail party and make intelligent pronouncements on topical and ethical issues. Topical is important: the best Stuff is what is in the newspapers, it’s what everyone is talking about. You need to have an opinion on President Obama’s health reforms in America even if you have always used the NHS, because you need to understand that Obama’s reforms can affect the direction of US politics. You must know about the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and how they are impacting on Life As We Know It, you must be conversant on the Great Climate Change Debate (if you don’t know what happened at Copenhagen, bone up on it now) so that you can knowledgeably discuss economic losses from global warming (if you are an economist) or legal implications of (if you’re studying law).
All that is Stuff.
In the old days, before Facebook, and before newspapers and TV were dominated by vacuous celebrities, you got most Stuff from the news media. Early lessons in developing instant opinions on Stuff came from hearing Dad shout at the TV.
But that was then and this is now.
You no longer pick up Stuff. You have to go in search of it. Usually via Google, which does not necessarily provide the best overview of Stuff you need, much of it being out of date. Stuff has become pretty random, and therefore elusive and even more sought after than before.
The need to know Stuff has become so important, it is being taught.
New courses are springing up on campuses, like weeds between the cracks of education, and some of them are at quite prestigious institutions, too.
The London School of Economics has just started its own Bluffers guide to Stuff opaquely called “LSE 100”. (100 what? 100 facts? 100 lessons? 100 per cent?). It is compulsory for all students a bit like “study skills” tends to be, but packaged as “skills graduates need in the modern world”, a marketing slogan that could apply to anything in education.
LSE 100 will involve “group work, debates and exercises” so that students form opinions about events around them and are able to articulate them. In other words, they will talk to each other. In that sense, it is completely different from other undergraduate interactions like snooker, table football and karaoke.
Why does the LSE need to do this? One reason is that it has set the grade barrier so high for entry, particularly in Economics, that it is getting too many number-crunching nerds and not enough communicators who can tell you why on earth they are crunching all these numbers. Students need learn to debate, predict and to “think”. Now there’s a thing - a world-class institution where students aren’t particularly good at “thinking”.
The LSE has a particular problem because its courses are mostly delivered in huge lectures with next to no interaction between lecturer and students. Its “teaching”, unlike its research, has consistently been given low marks by students. In other words the only value added that LSE seems to provide, is its brand stamp on the CV of its students, not on their knowledge or thinking. That did not matter in boom times when graduates went straight from the LSE into the top banks and consultancies. It does now when employers are picking and choosing.
Imperial College has for some time had “communication skills” as a course for its students. Many science degrees at other universities include some non-science – philosophy or history of science is popular. They must not only prepare for careers in theoretical physics these days, they must also apply their scientific learning to Stuff and be able to tell non-scientists about it in an interesting way.
Less specialised institutions are so concerned that their students are lacking in Stuffing that they are redesigning courses, some are even talking about introducing liberal arts degrees, which can be anything you want them to be, and are generally a foundation course in Stuff. Other institutions are introducing general courses in the first (or even second) years of study. General courses cover a fair bit of Stuff, which, after all, used to be called General Knowledge.
Employers are a canny bunch, they are adept at spotting where there is a shortage. So, for example, they shout about British and American graduates not having foreign languages, and demand fluency in at least two before they will hire, even if recruits never, ever use those languages again. Because employers see fewer and fewer interviewees who can hold their own on Stuff, they want candidates to have a lot of it, whether or not they need it.
I have a theory, when books have disappeared, and have been completely replaced by Stuff, most of it only digitally available, employers will be looking for recruits who are proficient in Literature and only books of 500 pages and above will count.
Institutions like the LSE that do not now do so, will add literature and philosophy courses. They will have to, or their students will be well and truly stuffed when they come out into the real world of never having enough.

Mama knows best (and is backed by the State)

It is a long standing joke. The Indian parent looks at their new-born offspring and sees only a doctor or an engineer, the Jewish-American parent boasts about “my son the lawyer” and the Chinese parent thinks the world is made up of only three professions – medicine, medicine and medicine.
Parents from these groups – I will call them aspirant parents - have been choosing their children’s professions for a very long time. And their list of preferred professions have changed very little – all are based on superior education, stability, high earnings and respect (from others).
In these recessionary times, their way of thinking is spreading to other parents who, in better times, would have allowed their offspring free reign. Broadly, because they have invested a great deal of money in their offspring’s university education, they are looking for safe havens for their investment. Some are even talking of a “return” on the money paid in university fees.
A recent survey at the University of Westminster, in England, a country that traditionally saw parents taking a back seat in their children’s professional choices, found that almost a quarter of London University students were “forced” to study their subject because of parental pressure. Few prizes as to which subjects have the most “forced” students. They include medicine, law, accountancy, finance, and more recently, economics.
Recession surveys also to show more students regretting their degree choice. And those subjects seem to be clustered around the humanities and creative subjects. Following one’s heart suddenly seems outmoded unless you have the contacts to prise open doors.
Immigrants have always known that. They rarely have the contacts in the host country, so following one’s heart is far too risky at the best of times. In good times they sometimes give in to “rebellious” offspring as long as they get into the “best” art school and exhibit at the Royal Academy or if they have to study English it should be at Oxford and lead straight to a job reading the news on BBC television. But in bad time like these, parents know best.
Young people coming off the university conveyor belt worry about keeping up with their peers. The main measure is the “graduate starting salary”, usually inflated dramatically by those lucky enough to get a “graduate job”, in order to provoke instant admiration. Final year students soon become aware that the highest starting salaries are in just a few professions: law, medicine, accountancy and finance. Odd that.
Now there is a new champion of the professions. Government-sponsored research last year showed that 75 per cent of judges, 70 per cent of finance directors and a similar proportion of medics went to private schools, which educate only 7 per cent of the population. Something had to be done about the inequity of it, politicians said, in order to increase social mobility.
Among the aspirant groups, the statistics went around like wildfire. While everyone else was debating how these professions could admit more of the less privileged, the whisper among aspirant groups was – which schools did these judges and finance directors attend, and how does one get into them?
This week the government, that used to call for apprenticeships in carpentry and plumbing, was pushing for “10,000 internships” for graduates from “low income” families at top professional law and accountancy firms. In a meritocracy, it is talent and hard work that counts, not connections or wealth, they insisted, but by giving it such a high profile, the way the aspirant groups saw it, the government was doing nothing less than endorsing their own long-held view that these are the professions to aim for.
Mama was right after all and is even backed by the state.
Soon the universities will be full of young people forced to study subjects they do not like. Motivation will be far lower and the drop out rate may even be higher.
But parents will be pleased.
And so will the government.

A world in which every graduate is a lawyer or economist

“We used to be divided up into the left brained and right brained, now there’s only lawyers and economists.” I heard this wry quip at the University of London Union the other day, and at first I thought it was a new wrinkle on the old “arts versus sciences” divide.
It wasn’t. It was a reflection of how student subject choices are converging around a far smaller number of subjects than before, despite a huge range of new degree offerings in all sorts of subjects, including Golfing, Surfing and Acupuncture.
In the past the verbally inclined studied History and English and a range of other “essay type” subjects. Those who might once have studied the humanities are turning in increasing numbers to studying Law. The more mathematical who might have done Science or Maths, are enrolling in Economics and Business Studies courses in droves, causing severe shortages in the Sciences and Engineering.
Medicine has always been popular, but the biologists and sociologists of old are turning increasingly to Psychology. Psychology is the generic social science.
Law, Economics, Psychology have been among the decade’s fastest growing degree subjects. Talk to ambitious sixth formers and, including Medicine, you’d think there was nothing else.
Whole areas of academic study are contracting. Languages graduates and sociologists are among the endangered species. And any kind of pure science is met with blank stares of pure incomprehension. You want to do what?
Of course the bunching up of subject choices is as much a result of rising student debt and salary expectations as it is due to fashion. It is the economics of studying economics, that counts not the subject itself. It is the logic (in career terms) of studying Law that drives the choice.
Universities have colluded in this, cashing in deftly on rising demand. Law can be delivered at relatively low cost, you just pack more students into the same lecture theatre. Law departments can be expanded more easily than say Dentistry, Veterinary Science and Architecture, which require considerable investment in space and training equipment.
The US has long believed it has too many lawyers. There is a widely held belief that great deal of litigation occurs simply to keep them in business. Yet law schools continue to churn out more and more of them. And why do we need so many Economists? One wit suggested to me that it was draw up projections of how many lawyers a company needs.
In some fields, students cotton on early that a fad is passing. In the 1990s, particularly in the run up to the dot.com boom, many were rushing to study Computing and Computer Science. Nowadays these graduates are the most likely to be still seeking a job six months after graduation. Many countries trained too many nuclear physicists in the 1970s and 80s as planned nuclear power stations failed to come on stream thanks to strong environmentalist lobbies. A nuclear scientist is a rare beast these days. Other gluts such as Medics in Germany in the 1980s and 1990s and Economists in the Netherlands in the 1990s were exported to shortage countries elsewhere in the European Union, so that the oversupply was not so apparent.
Law tends to be more country-specific so it is easier to spot an oversupply of lawyers.
Even the Law Society in England seems to think we have too many law graduates. It has been warning for some time that there aren’t enough training places for the vast numbers coming out of university law courses. In other words, the chances of actually becoming a lawyer are becoming slimmer.
In an unprecedented move this summer the Law Society started a campaign to warn university and secondary school students against choosing law as a career and is examining other ways to keep student numbers down.
Of course those will law degrees don’t necessarily want to be lawyers. Many politicians, thinktank wonks, businessmen, civil servants and even film-makers have law degrees, the training that they get at university is very transferable. But all the evidence points to students actually wanting to become lawyers. In 2007 shortly after the demise of Lehmann Brothers, which precipitated the recession, I spoke to the careers department of the London School Economics. Suddenly those who had been considering Banking as a career were now considering Law. How else would they pay off the cost of their degree?
I for one, think it is remarkably honest and brave of the Law Society to tell it how it is. Usually there is a conspiracy of silence around a glut. Some years ago Media Studies was all the rage despite the general derision in which such degrees were held by practicing journalists.
Universities piled on Media courses and they were lapped up. Some universities even invested in state of the art newsrooms and TV studios, nowadays forlorn and empty as a rust-belt car plant save for the occasional student editing some footage for a YouTube spot.
For a while it did not matter as so many tech-savvy media studies graduates were hoovered up by the expanding online-world. Every company had to have its webpage. That web page had to be constantly renewed, then redesigned and upgraded. That Media Studies graduates had been hoping to be TV news babes rather than webmonkeys was put aside. From the point of view from the universities, their graduates had jobs and could begin paying off their student loans.
But now the contraction in the traditional media industry has become so severe and, the skills mismatch has become heartbreakingly evident.
The problem is that unlike even a decade ago, degree subjects are not selected on the basis of individual talents or interests, but on trends and income (on graduation).
Everyone is looking out for the next big thing and if they find it, they are damned as hell going to go for it - all of them at once. It is a brave student who is maverick enough to study Latin or Linguistics without a thought for what they will do afterwards. If I were an employer I would hire them for simply daring to be different, and for not caring about the economics of graduate subject choice.
Still, there is a trend that intrigues me, a glimmer on the horizon: the growth and growth of philosophy and theology degrees. Those must be the ones philosophic about their future, or else praying that eventually something will turn up.

From Rags to Riches in One Easy English Lesson

Slumdog Millionaire is a rags to riches story. But not just in the way you think. The Chinese have taken note of the part where the slum kids are at slum school reading ‘The Three Musketeers’ in English. That strikes a very strong chord in China, where recently billboards have appeared in remote and poor villages that proclaim (in English) “Success in English means Success in Life.”
I was asked by a Chinese academic recently, do poor children in India really know English? He was impressed to hear that you can indeed find slum children in Mumbai or Delhi who can prattle away (albeit with a limited vocabulary) in English. It made him very, very thoughtful.
Why does it matter what slum kids speak? No one in Europe would consider Indian slum kids much competition in the world jobs market.
But China wants to be ahead. And it wants to be ahead of India. In a globalised world countries who can manufacture cheaply AND speak English, so can provide cheap services, will be a global economic superpower all the way up and down the production pyramid.
Currently China “outsources” much of its internationally-oriented management, and services to Hong Kong, with its English-proficient population. But China is looking into the future. And services rather than production will become bigger in the future.
You would think that China already regards itself as being ahead of India economically, so why regard it as a rival in this regard? However, at a recent International Symposium on cross border investment organised by the Judge Business School in Cambridge, Chinese delegates became quite prickly about the number of Indian businessmen invited to share the same platform. They wanted ‘Asia’ to themselves. That was not what you would expect from a nation that is confident about being ahead. Or perhaps they did not want to be shown up for speaking poor English.
Chinese children now learn English in primary school, and that tells you a lot about the priorities of the Chinese government. If you could stop the clock and wait for these children to grow into adulthood, any one of them could take on an Indian slum kid at reading ‘The Three Musketeers’. That is the thinking in Beijing, which specialises in the long view. But of course India is expanding its education generally, and has a younger population, so the number of India’s English speakers will always overtake China’s. Right?
Not everyone would agree, including applied linguist David Graddol. In a new British Council study “English Next India”, to be published early next year Graddol says India is not learning English “fast enough.”
“Much of the world is catching up (on India) in terms of the English proficiency of their populations,” he said at the British Council’s palatial building tucked between the big international banks in the centre of New Delhi. In fact, China may soon have more people who speak English than India, he predicted.
Now that could be frightening if it wasn’t absurd.
Graddol has gathered an impressive array of statistics for his report even delving into India’s census statistics, where few academics dare to tread. But he is unable to say how many Indians speak English. Others put the figure at anything between 15 million people and 35 million people.
But even those who are not officially proficient in English – many slum kids would be among them – will hear people speak English around them. They see the big advertising hoardings in English and they hear English on the Radio and TV, even if they tune into Hindi channels. It may be a mish-mash of Hindi and English but they will understand those English words.
That is not the case in China. Anyone who has been in a Chinese classroom will know that the way English is taught is far, far from the living, breathing way it is experienced in India.
China’s universities do not teach in English as many of India’s do. Its legal system (if it can be said to have one at all) does not operate in English as India’s does, it barely has any English language newspapers, and no English TV channels compared to India’s vibrant media landscape.
There are very good reasons that some prefer to do business in India rather than China, and the culture and rule of law are part of it.
That is not to say that there are not Chinese people who speak very good English. Many do. What appears to interest China more, though is India’s emergence as an outsourcing magnet and as a general service industry backroom processing centre, due in large measure to the level of English. Of course India’s real export earner, as a software-IT hub does not merely depend on English language skills.
Graddol said: “India will need many more people speaking English to sustain its economic growth.” That may be so. But if it looses business that requires English to other countries, it is hardly likely to be China. If it were just about English, and only English, it might loose business to The Philippines, but never to China.
The British Council has every reason to be pushing English (and textbooks and courses) overseas. It is big business for British publishers. But it is guilty of overstating the case for English.
To suggest that any country an internal market size of India or for that matter China, Russia or Brazil’s will “fall behind” without English is patently absurd. Japan became an economic power without English.
English is an important economic skill. But it is not enough to get slum kids out of the slum. And equally, a nation’s economic fortunes does not dependent on it.