The last parent-teacher meeting of the year, and I’m standing by the classroom door with a cup of lukewarm tea. Another parent walks up, nods at the course selection sheet in my hand, and says, “Your daughter’s going to take literature, right? That’s brave. My son says he wants to, but I keep telling him—think about your future.”
I know that tone. I’ve heard it since I was seventeen, sitting in my own school’s career counselling office, where the computer printout said I had “suitable aptitude for humanities.” The counsellor said “that’s nice” and immediately asked me what backup subjects I wanted for science. I picked history.
That memory comes back now, watching my daughter choose her grade eleven subjects. The other parent’s concern isn’t mean-spirited. It’s the same fear that runs through every middle-class home: that arts students sit around reading poems while science students build the world. But I’ve spent fifteen years working as an arts graduate—first as a copywriter, then as a content strategist, now as a manager in a tech company. The reality is messier, and honestly, more interesting.
The stereotype says science students are logical, arts students are creative. In practice, neither stays in their lane. I’ve seen engineering students who can’t write a clear email, and history graduates who code on the side. The real difference is not in the subjects themselves but in what we do with them. A good scientist and a good artist both observe, question, and spend long hours in uncertainty. The lab and the studio are not that different. The fear comes from confusing the label with the skill.
Take my niece, for example. She’s in grade twelve, and she’s brilliant at chemistry. She can balance equations in her sleep, and she also sings in a choir, writes short stories, and recently organised a school charity event that raised more than any previous year. Her parents are pushing her to drop music class so she can take an extra math session. When she told them she wanted to study something in the arts, they panicked.
I sat down with them as her uncle, but also as someone who has been on the other side. I didn’t say “don’t worry” or “arts is great.” I asked them this: what exactly do you think she’ll be unable to do after an arts degree? The father said, “She won’t have a stable job.” I asked for an example of a stable profession. He said doctor or engineer. I pointed out that engineers get laid off too, and doctors in some countries work long hours for little pay, and that neither of those paths protects you from having a bad boss.
Then I asked him what his daughter does when she takes the lead in a group project. He thought for a while and said, “She manages to get everyone to agree.” That’s a leadership skill. Arts degrees don’t hand that to you, but they force you to practise it every time you discuss a text or argue a point. Science does too, but differently—it asks you to agree with the evidence. The two mindsets are complementary.
Here’s what I’ve learned from my own work. My degree was in political science, which is technically an arts subject. I have never in my life been asked to name a political theorist in a job interview. What I am asked to do is read a complicated brief, figure out what the client actually needs, and explain it in simple words to a team of engineers. That is pure arts training. It teaches you to tolerate messy questions. In a science class, you get a clear answer at the end of the problem. In an arts class, you often end with more questions than you started. That makes people uncomfortable, but it’s the core skill of working in a world where no one hands you a formula.
I’m not saying science isn’t necessary. I’m saying we’ve built an unhelpful ranking. When I was at university, the arts faculty had a reputation for being the easy option. Then I spent a semester helping a friend in engineering with her report. She could solve complex calculus, but she struggled to structure a two-page written argument. I was the opposite. Neither of us was more intelligent. We were just trained differently.
What actually matters is what the child is like. Some kids are driven to take things apart and rebuild them. Some are driven to understand why people make choices. Most kids are a bit of both, but schools force them to pick. That’s where parents come in.
The most useful thing I did for my daughter was to change the conversation from “what job will this lead to” to “what problem do you want to work on.” She said she doesn’t know. That’s fine. I told her she doesn’t have to know. She just has to pick subjects that make her curious enough to go to class on a Monday morning. That sounds vague, but it’s practical: we looked at her actual timetable, and we removed the subjects she was already dreading, even though they looked better on a university application.
For the other parent at the meeting, I offered a concrete suggestion. Instead of asking your son what he’ll do with a degree in history, ask him to show you something he has made because of his interest. It could be a timeline, a written story, or a podcast he recorded with a friend. If he can show you that, he’s developing skills. If he’s just passively “interested,” that’s different—but that’s true of science too. A kid who says he loves physics but never solves a problem outside homework has the same issue.
I also told him a thing about failure. In arts subjects, failure isn’t a wrong answer. It’s a wrong interpretation, or a poorly structured essay, or an argument that doesn’t hold. You can revise it. There’s no finality. That teaches resilience in a way that a grade on a multiple-choice test doesn’t.
Back my daughter, she ended up choosing literature, history, and geography. She’s also taking on a maths class because she’s good at it and she wants to. I didn’t push her. The conversation at the meeting trailed off, as these things do, with the other parent saying he’ll think about it. That’s all I could ask.
Looking at my daughter’s subject list now, I remember my own grade eleven form. I had history, English, and a second language. I also had one science class, biology, because I wanted to. Nobody asked me if biology would be useful. They just assumed the arts subjects were the “soft” ones. But in my first job, my boss told me that most of the team could write code but not a single line of customer-facing copy. My arts background made me the one person who could handle both. That’s not a coincidence. Arts teaches you to work with people’s words and reasons, which doesn’t go away even in the most technical profession.
Where do arts and science students actually stand? They stand in the same mud. Both struggle with adapting, both have brilliant and dull days, and both end up in jobs that didn’t exist twenty years ago. The kid who runs away from science because it’s hard might be just as lost as the kid who runs away from arts because it’s “useless.” The only real question is whether a child is learning to think clearly, communicate honestly, and handle being wrong. Those skills cross every stream.
As for my daughter, she’s still figuring it out. She came home today and said her geography teacher gave them a project on public transport planning. She was excited because she had to interview people, draw diagrams, and make a budget. I didn’t say “that’s a great transferable skill.” I just said “show me the diagrams later.” And she did. That was enough for now.
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