What is the difference between a “hard” A level subject and a “soft” one? Many of the top universities claim to know. The former are the traditional academic subjects, Maths, English, Science and the like, while the latter, essentially, includes any subject devised within the last twenty years or so, especially if it is linked to a specific career option. The clue is usually in the name: “soft” subjects tend to have the word “studies” in their titles, as in, for example, “Theatre Studies”, “Business Studies” and – the media’s ultimate, rather ironic, bête noir – “Media Studies”. On what side of this divide a subject falls is important because many of those classified as “soft” have been barred as entrance qualifications to courses at a number of top universities, including all of those belonging to the so-called Russell Group.
The question, of course, is why? What makes “soft” A Levels less acceptable than “hard” ones? To make a distinction between “hard” subjects as academic and “soft” ones as vocational is overly simplistic: how is analyzing a literary text more academic than performing a similar analysis on an extract from an action film? Both involve looking for how specific conventions and codes convey meanings. Both, in other words, are academic exercises involving similar skills.
The truth is that “hard” and “soft” are, in the minds of those who coined the terms, no more than euphemisms for “difficult” and “easy”, the prevailing orthodoxy being that traditional academic subjects are more challenging than their more – and this has often been said – trendy modern counterparts. Again, though, a question is begged: by what rationale is, say, the production of a devised piece of theatre that has to be created from scratch by a team and worked up to public performance standard easier than learning Physics theories that have been generated by someone else and then applied in an examination? Proponents of Theatre Studies might point out that, while a wide range of people can learn Physics theories (even if most of them will lack the ability to build theories of their own), creative subjects, almost by definition, can only be accessed at the highest level by those in possession of rare talents. They might go on to argue that the aptitudes required to produce a devised piece of drama – creativity, organizational flair, technical know-how, teamworking and, perhaps, leadership skills – are highly relevant to life, whereas the majority of those Physics students who learn about the properties of light or how gravity works are unlikely ever to enter the type of scientific research environment in which such knowledge might actually be useful. What we are touching on here is the dichotomy between liberal and vocational education and this merits its own discussion – upon which I will embark in a future post.
For the time being, it is worth noting that the key distinction between “hard” and “soft” subjects is in their degree of abstraction from the everyday common sense world. The “hard” subjects are largely theoretical in bias, whereas “soft” subjects are mainly practical and skills-based. Even this typology is flawed, however, since it fails to account for Languages; these are classed as “hard” subjects but they endow their learners with very definite and specific skills. Nevertheless, “hard” subjects are not generally the vehicle for anything that could with justice be described as “training”. Does this mean that - to turn current thinking on its head – the “hard” subjects are actually inferior in that they are, to put it bluntly, useless, whereas “soft” subjects at least give their students something they can do? Graduate employment rates from the higher education versions of these courses would suggest that few people think so. In any case, such a conclusion would come from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of academic and vocational study. In (very) broad terms, academic subjects build individual minds, whereas vocational subjects respond to a perceived social need. Whether that makes one type more difficult than the other is open to debate – one which will be pursued in future posts. We might tentatively agree, though, that universities are correct in seeing their primary mission as the first of these possibilities.
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