“THE USELESS DISCIPLINES”
No academic discipline is inherently useless, argues
GODWIN SOGOLO
I have borrowed this title from Allan Douglas Galloway, a Scottish Professor of Theology who taught at University College Ibadan in the 1950s. At the dawn of university education in colonial Africa, scholars engaged in robust debates about the kind of university and intellectual foundation appropriate for the emerging nations of the continent. In one such lecture, delivered before the Philosophical Society, University College Ibadan on January 11, 1956, Galloway adopted the title “Useless Disciplines” in an explicitly ironic sense.
What, precisely, does it mean to describe a discipline as useful or useless? For our purpose here, a stipulative definition will suffice. A discipline may be regarded as useful, only if its value is self-evident; if it has – particularly in the Nigerian context – a clear market value; leads directly to employment, or contributes in a tangible way to measurable development. It is in this sense that disciplines such as engineering, medicine, agriculture, law, administration, and the applied sciences were classified among Galloway’s “useful” disciplines. Were he writing today, he would almost certainly have extended his list to include computer science, accounting, journalism, entrepreneurship, artificial intelligence and other related fields.
By contrast, a discipline may be labelled “useless” – again, in the Nigerian context – if its value cannot be easily assessed in practical or monetary terms, and if its contribution to development is not quantitatively measurable. In Galloway’s discussion, this designation applies – somewhat pointedly – to fields such as the classical studies, philosophy, history, sociology, literature, the arts, religious studies/theology.
The remarkable character of Galloway’s era was not so much the categorisation itself, but the manner in which such issues were approached. They were subjected to sustained intellectual scrutiny – within and beyond the confines of the university – before any policy decisions were taken. Today, matters that used to be subjects of intellectual debates have degenerated into administrative fiat. Policies affecting the very soul of university education are now imposed with hardly any regard for scholarly input.
The consequences have been predictable. In 2007, history – branded as useless by some officials of the Federal Ministry of Education – was excised from the curricula of primary and junior secondary schools, a profoundly misguided decision whose effects lingered until its eventual restoration in 2022. One might have expected that such a misstep would serve as a cautionary tale. It did not.
At the conclusion of the curriculum review exercise that produced the Core Curriculum and Minimum Academic Standards (CCMAS) in 2022, it became evident that a determined group of officials within the educational establishment remained committed to the same narrow utilitarian vision. This influential clique – operating in close alignment with authorities in the Ministry – attempted to remove GST 112: Philosophy and Logic from the list of compulsory General Studies courses. Their justification was as revealing as it was troubling: they could find no relevance in philosophy, logic, or critical thinking for national development. In other words, the very disciplines that cultivate reasoning, clarity, and intellectual independence were deemed expendable.
It required a sustained and resolute intervention by the Nigerian Philosophical Association to halt this intellectual erosion and restore GST 112 to its rightful place. That such a struggle was necessary at all should give us pause. A nation that sidelines critical thought does so at its own peril.
And that peril is hovering around, once again, with the recent news in April 2026 that the Federal Ministry of Education was planning to purge Nigerian universities of “useless” or “irrelevant” disciplines – reminiscent of Galloway’s warning in the 1950s. The reasoning by ministry officials was that education in Nigeria must shift in favour of “market-relevant and industry-relevant courses, especially in areas like artificial intelligence, data science and entrepreneurship”.
The tragedy of the Nigerian educational system is that those who make its most consequential decisions often lack a sufficient grasp of its structure and inner workings. More troubling still, those who possess such understanding – for instance, Fellows and Members of the Nigerian Academy of Letters – are either not consulted or are reluctant to stake their reputations in the public arena and therefore remain silent.
Yet the moment calls for clarity and courage. It must be stated, plainly and without equivocation, that no academic discipline is inherently useless. The real problem lies elsewhere: in the weak absorptive capacity of the Nigerian economy, in limited job creation, and in the persistent disconnect between education and the world of work.
Also important is the need to resist the dangers of a narrow technocratic conception of education – one that places premium only on commercially viable skills and reduces knowledge to immediate market utility. Such a view is profoundly short-sighted. The modern world depends, perhaps more than ever, on human capacities such as critical thinking, communication, ethical reasoning, and policy analysis – capacities that are deeply rooted in the humanities and social sciences. To undermine these disciplines is not merely to misjudge their worth; it is to impoverish the intellectual foundations upon which any meaningful national development must rest.
It is mistaken to set science and technology in opposition to the humanities, as though one must be chosen at the expense of the other. On the contrary, the two are complementary and mutually reinforcing. Nations require engineers, doctors, and programmers just as much as they need philosophers, historians, writers, and ethicists.
A society may, for instance, produce engineers who build bridges, yet it requires another kind of expertise to decide where those bridges should lead, whom they ought to serve, and whether their distribution is just. A country may also develop artificial intelligence, but without proper control and ethical guidance, such technology can become harmful, even destructive. One set of questions is technical; the other is moral. Both demand distinct, though complementary, forms of knowledge and expertise.
We live in a society marked by corruption, weak institutions, civic distrust, ethnic suspicion, and a deep crisis of public morality. These are not problems that technological advancement alone can resolve. What is needed, alongside technical progress, is a deliberate cultivation of human capacities – sound judgment, critical reflection, integrity, and moral conscience. It is precisely these qualities that the humanities are uniquely positioned to nurture, ensuring that the benefits of technology are not only maximised but also responsibly directed.
History teaches us to remember and learn from the past as a guide to the future. Literature cultivates empathy by enabling us to inhabit lives beyond our own. Philosophy trains the mind to reason clearly, detect fallacies, and question assumptions; linguistics and languages foster effective communication; the arts promote and preserve imagination, identity, and the emotional truths that statistics cannot capture. Religion, in turn, attends to the spiritual dimension of human existence.
The more profound truth is that even the sciences themselves owe a debt to the so-called useless disciplines. Logic, as a branch of philosophy, underlies mathematics and computer science; ethics provide guidance to medicine and medical research while political philosophy helps in shaping constitutional democracy. Is it not true that linguistics enriches communication technologies? That is why the boundary between “useful” and “useless” is not only misleading, but utterly false.
No doubt, Nigeria urgently needs doctors, engineers, agronomists, innovators, and entrepreneurs. But it also requires citizens who can think critically, leaders capable of sound judgment, and institutions guided by humane values. Technical competence without moral intelligence can become a dangerous form of efficiency. Indeed, the disciplines so often dismissed as “useless” are those upon which we depend to ensure that society itself does not collapse.
The earliest investigators of nature – Aristotle, Pythagoras, Democritus, and others – asked questions about motion, matter, causation, number, and change. They sought rational explanations for natural phenomena rather than relying solely on myth or superstition. This shift from mythic explanation to reasoned inquiry was one of philosophy’s greatest gifts to science. It established the principle that the world is intelligible and can be investigated through thought and observation.
Furthermore, the very methods of science owe much to philosophy. What counts as evidence? How do we distinguish knowledge from opinion? Can observation alone yield truth, or must hypotheses guide inquiry? These were the philosophical questions asked by Francis Bacon and others who first emphasised empirical observation and induction, thereby helping to shape experimental science.
Philosophy continues to equip humanity to question, reason, classify, test, and reflect. Logic has been foundational to the development of computing, while ethics guides the responsible application of technological innovation. Language on, on the other hand, enables the communication and dissemination of discovery; history preserves collective memory; literature enlarges the scope of human imagination. It is, therefore, wrong to claim that science and technology stand apart from the humanities. They rest, in part, upon the foundations built by the humanities themselves.
Even the most advanced developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) draw, not only on science and technology – algorithms, data structures, and software engineering – but also on the humanities, especially philosophy and the study of language. AI, in particular, owes a profound debt to philosophical inquiry, which for centuries has posed foundational questions: What is intelligence? What is reasoning? What distinguishes mind from matter? What is knowledge? It was Aristotle who developed formal logic, a precursor to computational reasoning, while Alan Turing famously asked whether machines can think.
To neglect the humanities, especially philosophy, is to forget the intellectual roots of modern civilization itself. Nigeria and other developing societies can draw an important lesson from this history. True, all nations need engineers, doctors, and programmers; but they also need philosophers, historians, writers, and ethicists who help define wise purposes for technical power. A society may acquire machines rapidly yet remain poor in judgment.
Two examples may serve to illustrate the cost of neglecting the so-called “useless” disciplines in a society. The first is the United States of America, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world, with some of the finest minds across both the sciences and the humanities. Yet, at a critical moment, its political machinery faltered, producing leadership that has left the nation visibly unsettled, with strains evident in its institutional fabric – even in an era characterised by remarkable scientific and technological achievement, such as renewed journeys to the moon.
The second example is Nigeria, a country richly endowed with both natural and human resources. For decades, its scientists, innovators, and scholars in the humanities have been sought after across the world. Yet, despite this abundance, the nation continues to grapple with deep social and institutional challenges. Here too, the humanities appear not to have sufficiently shaped the moral and civic foundations required to hold society together, and, as it were, things seem to be falling apart.
Ultimately, the issue is not whether some disciplines are “useful” and others “useless,” but how a balanced educational system might integrate practical competence with critical and intellectual depth. It is in this equilibrium that the true promise of university education resides.
Sogolo is an Emeritus Professor who has taught and conducted research in Philosophy for over five decades – first at the University of Ibadan and currently at the National Open University of Nigeria. He also served as a member of the Editorial Board of The Guardian Newspapers in the 1980s and 1990s.
