“Too many young people are making choices aged 15, which will hold them back for the rest of their life”, Nicky Morgan, Secretary of State for Education, warned in a speech last week.

Now, what might she have been referring to, you ask. Youth crime? No. The Arts and Humanities.

Morgan’s intentions to encourage teenagers and particularly young girls in the pursuit of subjects like physics were noble enough. But breaking down the myth of the terrifying natural sciences by perpetuating that of the life-ruining arts – really? A cultural education, she implies, is a reckless choice that will limit you until the day you die. Faced with such charges, those of us who are already knee-deep in a humanities degree tend to slip into an offended mode of defence: enumerating professional sectors that love artsy students, referring to that guy we know who did Philosophy and is now a successful consultant, trying to make our subjects sound like they matter and our choices like they were the right ones. Let’s not do that today.

Will knowledge in art history or French thought necessarily catapult you up the career ladder? Probably not. Of course Morgan is right. And of course she is wrong. For, even if we totally ignore the chance of being wildly successful and getting crazy rich with a humanities degree (or, dare I say it, with no degree at all), we might want to take a moment to question the basis on which she judges a limited life.

It’s hard to talk about the benefits of an arts education without sounding like a university brochure, but if there’s one thing I haven’t found mine to be it's limiting. “Holding you back for the rest of your life” is a funny way to describe disciplines that allow you to go beyond what society has agreed to be of value. That frequently force your mind to expand in weird, uncomfortable ways, that encourage it to think beyond the narrow lines of your CV, that make it solve problems and stretch around sharp edges for no practical purpose at all. That foster the basic revelation – and I’d be ashamed to spell out such a cliché if Morgan had not asked for it so loudly – that your life cannot be laid out, measured or justified in terms of its financial turnover.

When Morgan refers to the old days in which you could choose arts and humanities “if you didn’t know what you wanted to do” since you assumed those subjects could be “useful for all kinds of jobs”, she conveniently ignores the amount of people who are fully aware that their interest in, say, Russian literature will not be useful for the job market one bit, but still opt to go for it simply because they think engaging with culture might be its own reward.

A cultural education is a reckless choice. Don’t let anyone hold you back (not even the Secretary of State for Education).