KEVIN MAHER ON STUDYING THE MEDIA

Flaky film degrees tell you more about life than maths

• Film students can be immersed in social history, economics or feminist theory (Getty Images)

Kevin Maher

Published at 12:01AM, August 17 2015

Oi! Education snobs! Enough already with the “flaky” insults. After last week’s A-level hysteria, the Joint Council for Qualifications has revealed that the number of pupils taking allegedly tougher, more challenging subjects such as maths has risen this year. Simultaneously, and much to the delight of education snobs everywhere, the numbers taking so-called “flaky” subjects, such as media studies, has fallen.
In short, say the observers, including the schools minister Nick Gibb, who recently praised this apparent return to “core academic subjects”, dummies are out, brainiacs are in.
Well, as someone who boasts a master’s in what must surely be one of the dumbest, flakiest subjects imaginable — film studies (I know, hilarious, isn’t it?) — I take enormous exception to the short-sighted assumptions behind this argument. In fact, I will let my film studies master’s take the Pepsi challenge with any maths degree from any university any day of the week and I’m confident the film spods will come out on top.
Under the guise of “studying film”, I was submerged, reluctantly it must be said (I was a student after all), in Italian social history (to back up the module on Italian neorealist cinema), German political history (for Weimar cinema), Marxist economics (for the term on the Paris riots of May 1968), Lacanian psychoanalysis (the Hitchcock class) and post-structuralist feminist theory (the Doris Day module).
It was ten months of non-stop brain-ache, speed-reading, essay writing, opinion-forming and tub-thumping debate, with a few movies thrown in. As a concentrated mind-expanding educational experience, it was more informative, inspiring and galvanising than anything I had done before or, to be brutally honest, since.