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Every school ranks subjects identically
The Subject Ranking
The hierarchy continues inside the arts, where art and music normally rank above drama and dance. No education system on the planet teaches dance to children every day the way it teaches mathematics. Children dance all the time if they're allowed to, yet as they grow up they are educated progressively from the waist up, and then the focus settles on the head, slightly to one side.
Industry's Influence
Public education systems didn't exist in most places before the 19th century, and they all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. That put the subjects most useful for work at the top. It's why so many people were steered benignly away from music or art because they would never get a job doing that.
The Academic Root
The second root is academic ability. Universities designed the system in their image, so public education around the world works as a protracted process of university entrance. Many highly talented, creative people come out of it believing they aren't, because the thing they were good at in school wasn't valued or was stigmatized.
How did industrialism shape what schools teach?
Mass schooling spread in the nineteenth century as factories and offices needed workers who could read, write, and do arithmetic. England's Elementary Education Act of 1870 set up board schools to provide elementary schooling for children across the country, and Prussia had built a state school system decades earlier. Those early curricula centered on reading, writing, and arithmetic, the skills clerks and factory managers needed. Subjects like music and drawing were present, but they sat at the edges of the timetable.
How did universities come to set the school curriculum?
In the United States, the Committee of Ten, a group of educators chaired by Harvard president Charles Eliot, issued a report in 1892 recommending a common set of high school subjects. Many of its members were college leaders, and the report treated preparation for college as a central purpose of the high school course. Universities also set entrance requirements, which pushed schools to teach whatever the entrance examinations tested. That arrangement gave subjects like mathematics and languages their place at the top of the timetable.
Why are the arts ranked so low in many school systems?
Arts subjects are harder to measure with standard tests than mathematics or languages, and school systems often allocate time and funding according to what is tested. In England, the 2010s introduced a performance measure called the English Baccalaureate that counted English, mathematics, sciences, languages, and history or geography, and left arts subjects out. Surveys by arts education groups in England reported falling entries for arts GCSEs in the years that followed. The measure was the government's own, set out in its performance tables.
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