Last Wednesday the exam board AQA – of whom I already have traumatic memories from my secondary school experience – announced that as of 2018 their Art History A-Level (the only one in the country) will be scrapped. Also facing the axe are Classical Civilisation, Archaeology, and Anthropology. The cull of subjects in such similar veins has been taken as confirmation by many of ex-education secretary Michael Gove’s (the same guy who thought free schools and the removal of the AS level was a good idea) war on so-called ‘soft subjects’ (though he has denied this via Twitter). The move has been widely condemned by cultural powerhouses like the Courtauld Institute and the Royal Academy.

Their rationale? Grading complexity, and a lack of demand. It’s true the subject is a niche one (as with most disciplines, even more so at A-Level than at university); last summer only 839 students across the UK studied Art History (about a twentieth of the number of students taking the AQA Mathematics paper). It’s further true that 90 of the 107 schools offering the subject were fee-paying, but the lack of accessibility of a service isn’t a valid defence of its removal – especially when what’s being provided is something vitally important. AQA have vastly underestimated the importance of the arts if they feel it was more worth their time scrapping it than saving it.

It’s true that no universities demand an A-Level in the subject for course entry, but that doesn’t mean (as AQA have postulated) that it won’t result in a decline of people studying it. Art History shouldn’t be the preserve of the rich, but scrapping the A-Level does nothing to level the playing field between state and public school applicants; if anything, it will deter applicants who may otherwise have had a pathway to the subject via the A-Level. My school (a local state comprehensive) didn’t offer Art History – I don’t think any of its students ever went on to study it either; maybe they might have done if it had been an option. We can simultaneously prove that Art History was a preserve of the rich, and still maintain that its loss is a detriment, because the most disadvantaged still have the most to lose.

The decision denotes an abject lack of both optimism and imagination. It’s naive to believe Art History can’t teach us anything valuable or relevant, as people with STEM priorities seem to be suggesting. We are force fed so violently and so often the rhetoric that technology is the future, making it easy and even fashionable to write of the arts as a waste of both time and money (I’m reading Egyptology; I do it myself often enough). We all are a little guilty at times of forgetting that art is about so much more than Chagall and Rossetti (or Shakespeare, or Greek theatre, or any other number of wonderful things): it is about learning how to critically assess media, a medium with which our world is becoming increasingly saturated – largely as a result of the technological advancement we continue to chase. The arts are multidisciplinary subjects that stretch our comprehension of history, language, chemistry, technology and our methods through which we explore and communicate our existence in the world no less. Surely there is nothing more relevant than that?

This discussion goes beyond Art History, though. It’s indicative of the current government’s attitude towards financial provisioning for both the arts and state schools, both of which have been sold for spare parts in the march the UK continues to make towards politically right-wing values. The stretch of resources in state schools is far larger than arts teaching, but if we continue to neglect demonstrating the value of artistic expression to young people, we risk creating a generation too preoccupied with running down the future that they are incapable of comprehending the beauty and complexity of the present