An important news

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Yes... I'm blogging while I'm studying for my exams... but I came across one article which I find irresistable not to post it here. Here goes:

Report highlights golden future of history graduates

Donald MacLeod
Tuesday July 19, 2005


In an age when "so last week" is a withering insult, what are the prospects for graduates who, like Euan Blair, have just spent three or four years stuck in previous centuries?
Very good, according to two reports on the employability of history graduates, published by the Higher Education Academy. A string of successful careers in the media, business, politics and even spying have been built on a history degree, found the reports' author David Nicholls.

"A remarkable number have gone on to become the movers and shakers of modern-day Britain," he notes. Highflying historians range from the chancellor, Gordon Brown, and four other members of the cabinet to the head of MI6, John Scarlett; from radio presenters Nicky Campbell and Simon Mayo, TV presenters Jonathan Ross and Timmy Mallett to the general secretary of the TUC, John Monks, the chairman of Woolworths, Gerald Corbett, and the outgoing chairman of Manchester United, Sir Roy Gardner. History graduates are found in disproportionate numbers on the boards of the UK's top 100 companies.

In a survey of 84 famous historians carried out by Prof Nicholls, Princess Diana's biographer, Andrew Morton, said a history education "helps with judgment and at the top level judgment counts more than knowledge (Prince Charles is also a history graduate, although his views are not recorded in the report).

The most frequently mentioned advantage the famous history graduates mentioned was the ability to read quickly and effectively and process large amounts of information, think deeply about a subject, develop cogent arguments and communicate clearly. All this young Mr Blair will be able to put on his CV from Bristol, from where he graduated yesterday.

Turning to present day history degree courses in his report for the academy's subject centre for history, Prof Nicholls concludes they are preparing students well for employment, with particularly good writing skills, although they could do more on numeracy and oral communication. He suggests university history courses could make more use of spreadsheets and databases to improve this, but he says it would be a mistake to try to impose transferable skills at the expense of enjoyment of the subject for its own sake.

"Students were not choosing history at school or university because of its skills content or because they saw it as a passport to a job. Rather they saw it as an opportunity to study something that interested them," he writes. Killing enjoyment with an obsession with employability skills would be counterproductive, but skills could be improved with minor adjustments to the curriculum.

Prof Nicholls also discusses whether history attracts a certain type of personality. As a historian, he is a bit sceptical of this theory, although he feels there is some substance to it. Historians are more likely to see themselves as sceptical, iconoclastic, ideas-oriented, warm and socially pushy, as opposed to trusting, conservative, solution-oriented, emotionally distant or shy (you recognise the engineers).

He concludes: "With a history degree you can aspire to be prime minister, press baron and media mogul, overlord of the BBC, 'the most famous lawyer in the land', archbishop of Canterbury, top spook, leading diplomat, police chief, Oxbridge chancellor and vice-chancellor, England footballer and football manager, or chairman of the richest football club in the world, famous comedian or celebrated pop musician, bestselling novelist, trade union boss, business millionaire and perhaps even one day monarch of the realm."

Source: http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,9830,1531834,00.html


Yeah, an article indicating the employability of history students!!!! Who says history students can only go and teach????

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