Ask students why they have chosen business as a subject and you will often get a perfectly reasonable answer: “I want to work in business.”
There may be a logic to it, albeit deeply flawed. Students are increasingly encouraged to think about careers before making subject choices. When we look a little deeper, that itself is rather depressing. The students we teach today may be working until they are seventy-five. Perhaps we could allow them to choose a few subjects simply because they find them interesting.
But the fact remains: students who imagine themselves running a company one day think the study of business is going to be of value. I’ve got news for them.
I do have a problem with that idea. Not quite enough of a problem to argue that business should disappear from schools, but I’m probably closer to that position than many of my colleagues would be comfortable with.
My sister attended a highly regarded girls’ school in the UK in the 1980s. Its equally highly regarded Headteacher had a fairly straightforward view of Business Studies: it wasn’t academically robust enough for her girls.
Forty years later, I have rather more sympathy with her position than perhaps I did at the time.
I’m simply not convinced that studying business at school is necessarily the best way to help a young person consider a career in this vague idea of ‘business’.
In fact, if a 15-year-old told me they wanted to become an entrepreneur, run a multinational company or spend their career “in business”, I’d probably rather they studied economics. Or geography. Or history.
Those subjects may appear less directly vocational. I think that’s part of their value.
Very few 15-year-olds tell me they are studying geography because they intend to “work in geography”. Yet a good geography course asks them to understand globalisation, trade, development, demographics, resources, cities, inequality and environmental change. History asks them to evaluate evidence, understand causation, recognise competing interpretations and construct arguments. Economics gives them a framework for understanding markets, incentives, competition, government intervention and the allocation of scarce resources.
All of which strike me as rather useful things to understand if you eventually want to run a business.
Perhaps that is part of the problem the humanities face. We increasingly ask subjects to demonstrate what they are for, and some subjects have a much easier answer than others.
What is history for if you don’t intend to become a historian? Why study geography if you aren’t planning to become a geographer? Why spend several years learning about development, migration, industrialisation or political change if none of those words is likely to appear directly in your future job title?
For me, the answer has always been fairly straightforward. You are going to live in the world, and it would be useful to understand some of it.
Start with a T-shirt
One of my favourite things to teach is fast fashion, partly because it is almost impossible to keep it within the boundaries of one subject.
We can start with something completely ordinary: a T-shirt. Look at the label and there is a reasonable chance it was manufactured somewhere such as Bangladesh, Vietnam, China or Cambodia. That immediately gives us something to investigate. Why are clothes sold in London, Sydney or Singapore being manufactured thousands of kilometres away?
We are already into economics. Labour costs matter, as do global trade, supply chains, transport and the decisions made by multinational companies. Consumer behaviour matters too, because the whole system partly depends upon our desire to buy large quantities of clothing relatively cheaply.
Then we can look at the people making those clothes. What are they paid? What are their working conditions like? What protections do they have? Who decides what constitutes an acceptable wage? At that point economics begins to overlap with politics, development and questions about rights. Students invariably start with the premise of ‘they should be paid more’.
“How many of you want to pay more for the clothes?” More interestingly, what if we ask the workers how they feel? It’s a difficult concept for us to ponder as we rant about the fast-fashion multinationals: many workers who we tag as exploited will also tell you that their employment is improving their children’s lives.
There is something rather patronising about privileged outsiders insisting on telling someone they are exploited while ignoring the possibility that the same job may also have improved their family’s life.
I sometimes take students somewhere rather different at this point and introduce Dickens and Oliver Twist. We look at Victorian Britain, industrialisation, child labour and working conditions. It can initially seem like a strange diversion when we are supposed to be studying contemporary fast fashion in Bangladesh, but that is precisely why I like doing it. In fact, recently I had a student in Year 8 (academically very strong) who I noticed was reading her Kindle. She commented, “Well, this isn’t geography, so I’m reading something else.”
That outrageous student interruption aside, there are more interesting questions. Were conditions during Britain’s own industrialisation so different? Why did they eventually improve? Is it reasonable for countries which went through their own period of dirty and sometimes brutal industrialisation to tell developing economies that they must follow a different path?
I don’t necessarily want students to arrive at the same answers. I do want them to realise that Bangladesh in 2026 did not appear from nowhere and that economic development has a history.
Then there is the environmental side. Cotton requires land and water. Dyeing and manufacturing can pollute rivers. Clothes have to travel around the world and eventually be disposed of somewhere. Some are recycled, some are exported, some end up in landfill. The crisis of the Aral Sea links directly to their clothes, not to mention the appalling pollution in Indonesia’s rivers.
Eventually we can ask perhaps the most difficult question: who is responsible for all of this? Is it the factory owner, the multinational company placing the order, the government setting labour and environmental standards, or those of us who quite like being able to buy a T-shirt for the price of lunch? Recently in Taiwan, I passionately implored students to consider their purchasing. That weekend I bought some good-quality cheap shorts from a popular Japanese brand, three for the price of two. I fessed up, of course; we are all part of the problem.
The world doesn’t fit the timetable
Schools divide knowledge into subjects for very good reasons. I am a geography specialist and I am not remotely embarrassed about being protective of my subject. Disciplines matter because they develop knowledge and particular ways of looking at problems. Historians are trained to think about evidence, causation, change and context in ways that are not identical to economists. Geographers think about place, scale and connections. Economists bring concepts such as scarcity, incentives and opportunity cost.
I am therefore not arguing for sweeping all of this away and replacing it with a generic subject called “Understanding the World”. There is a danger in interdisciplinarity becoming rather vague. Students can have an interesting discussion about climate change, migration or inequality without actually knowing very much about any of them. Making connections is useful, but you need some knowledge to connect in the first place.
The problem is that the organisation of schools can sometimes encourage students to see the divisions as more real than they are. Geography happens in one room. History happens in another. Economics is after lunch. Science is on the third floor.
Students become remarkably good at pigeonholing knowledge in exactly the way we have organised it for them.
The world is rather less accommodating.
The mechanics of climate change are clearly a scientific issue, but it is also geographical, economic, political, historical and ethical. Migration involves economics, geography, history, politics, culture and identity. War makes little sense without both history and geography and increasingly requires some economics as well. Artificial intelligence may be technological, but many of the questions it is creating concern employment, inequality, regulation, power and ethics.
Subjects are useful ways of organising knowledge. We just need to be careful that students don’t mistake our filing system for the way the world actually works.
History explains how we got here
History sometimes has a particularly difficult time defending itself against the question of usefulness because, by definition, it deals with things that have already happened.
Except the present is absolutely full of things that have already happened.
Borders have histories. Countries have histories. Political institutions have histories. Patterns of wealth and poverty have histories. The languages people speak and the relationships between neighbouring countries have histories.
It is extraordinarily difficult to understand contemporary India without knowing something about colonialism and Partition. European integration makes rather more sense if you know what happened in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. Many contemporary political disputes become incomprehensible when stripped of everything that happened before yesterday.
History doesn’t give students a magic ability to predict what happens next. I am always slightly wary of the endlessly repeated claim that history teaches us not to repeat the mistakes of the past; human beings appear quite capable of knowing a great deal of history and making spectacular mistakes anyway.
What it does do is remind students that the present has causes. Things have changed before, they could have developed differently, and they can change again.
Not to mention, it’s inherently interesting. Can there really be a person who cannot find any aspect of the entire history of humanity interesting? The Scramble for Africa (which rarely gets on curricula) is frankly bonkers. Rich, inbred Europeans carving up a continent and giving bits of it away as gifts!
Geography asks why it happened there
Geography has its own image problem. Mention the subject to adults and there is a decent chance someone will start talking about capital cities, flags or oxbow lakes.
There is nothing wrong with knowing where things are, and physical geography obviously matters enormously, but one of the things I want students to do when they leave my classroom is question everything.
Why there?
Why did that industry develop in that particular place? Cities grow and decline for reasons. People migrate along some routes and not others. Wealth is distributed extraordinarily unevenly across the world. And the same earthquake can be a manageable emergency in one country and an enormous human catastrophe in another.
Geography encourages students to look at the relationships between people, places, economies and environments. It also forces us to think about scale. Something can be beneficial nationally but damaging locally. Economic growth can improve millions of lives while creating environmental costs. Migration can benefit an economy while placing pressure on particular communities. Climate change can have very different consequences depending on where you happen to live.
Quite often, when somebody asks whether something is good or bad, the geographer’s irritating answer is: for whom, and where?
I rather like that.
Critical thinking needs something to think about
This is also why I become slightly uncomfortable when schools talk about skills as though they can float free from knowledge.
Critical thinking is obviously important. I would struggle to find a teacher who objects to students becoming better critical thinkers.
But you cannot critically think about nothing.
A student cannot make a particularly sophisticated judgement about whether globalisation has benefited Bangladesh if they know almost nothing about Bangladesh, trade, wages, industrialisation or development. They cannot evaluate competing arguments about migration without understanding why people migrate. They cannot decide whether tariffs are a brilliant way of protecting domestic workers or an expensive act of economic self-harm if they don’t know what a tariff is.
There is plenty of cognitive science behind this. Daniel Willingham has argued that although some thinking strategies can be taught, our ability to use them effectively depends heavily on knowledge of the particular domain. Critical thinking does not simply transfer neatly from one context to another.[1]
Knowledge and critical thinking are sometimes presented as though they are opposing educational philosophies. I have never really understood why. Knowledge gives students something worth thinking critically about.
This, to me, is where history and geography retain enormous value. Students will forget plenty of the individual facts we teach them. I have forgotten plenty myself. But gradually they acquire ways of making sense of new information: cause and consequence, continuity and change, place and scale, scarcity and choice, power, development, inequality, evidence and interpretation.
Those frameworks matter.
“But when am I ever going to use this?”
Every teacher eventually gets asked this question.
Sometimes it is entirely reasonable. Sometimes it is asked at 11.55 by somebody whose principal concern is whether you are going to let them leave for lunch early.
But I think the question itself is worth challenging.
We seem increasingly tempted to justify education by identifying the future economic transaction in which a particular piece of knowledge will become useful. I don’t know whether a student I teach today will ever be professionally required to explain the processes of erosion in rivers.
Probably not.
But I am reasonably confident they are going to live in societies arguing about immigration, climate change and weather-related hazards, taxation, inequality, trade, artificial intelligence and war. They are going to encounter politicians offering remarkably simple solutions to remarkably complicated problems. They are going to encounter social media posts which confidently present assertions as facts.
They will be workers, consumers and citizens. Some will become business owners and managers. When they do, I hope they understand that businesses do not exist in a vacuum. They operate in places, within political systems, shaped by histories, employing people, consuming resources and affecting environments.
Perhaps that is what the humanities are for.
Not because every student needs to become a historian, geographer or economist, and not because studying them guarantees wisdom. It plainly doesn’t.
But because the world is complicated, and these subjects give young people some exceptionally useful ways of understanding why.
Schools need subjects. Timetables need labels. Teachers need specialist knowledge and students need the depth that comes from studying disciplines properly.
But every so often we also need to open the doors between those classrooms and remind students that what they learned in history on Monday is still true when they arrive in geography on Wednesday.
Sometimes all it takes is a T-shirt.
[1] Daniel T. Willingham, “How Can Educators Teach Critical Thinking?”, American Educator, Fall 2020.