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Comment by marcosdumay | Hacker News Reader

Guess what, when you insist on doing only useless work, people start to think your work is useless.

Humanities are incredibly important. I'd kill for somebody to help me communicate better at my undergrad, or understand people better, or any deep understanding of politics. Was any of that available? Of course not. There were only boring lessons, full of useless bullshit with professors claiming even objectively false facts. I'd think half the professors at the humanities dept were politically naiver than me at the time, today I think I underestimated it. (Oh, yes, I got some nice lectures about geography at the biology dept - go figure.)

Now the writing is on the wall, humanities "uselessness" is almost unanimous. That's a shame, but maybe that causes things to change for once.

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> Was any of that available?

I took a fiction writing class, public speaking and American government. Did you not have any electives like that?

I think I know what you are getting at, but there's an important historical dimension.

The humanities are useless, in the sense that they do not fit the current idea of what a University's place in society should be.

Universities used to teach humanities almost to all students, some years even exclusively; not because it was useful in the olden days, but precisely because it was useless. It was a luxury. A university was a place for the upper tiers of society to park their kids until they got their hormones out of their system and were mature enough to assume their new leadership role in society. By studying the humanities, students connected with the past and it elevated their spirits for the future (meaning, they could make lower class people feel stupid for not having read Goethe). Studying latin, greek, literature, ... has largely been irrelevant for centuries, but this did not matter one bit for the students (or their parents paying for it). For them, this was just a time to learn dedication to hard work, sharpen their mind, network, and hopefully not knock-up too many custodian's daughters.

Students who did not follow in their parents situation (factory owners, lawyers, physicians, what have you ...) could end up in Academia, as faculty. It kept them out of trouble, they got paid handsomely, it made for a cute dinner table story when they were rambling about their field trip to Timbuktu. The "set-for-life" (aka tenure, high pay) nature of Academia is the most important give-away that these positions had nothing to do with usefulness, and everything to do with protecting status, about ensuring excess spawn could live comfortable lives and did not embarrass their families. Academia was (is) a different kind of clergy; highly educated, a path to an unencumbered life, but also somewhat irrelevant.

The big shift is not that the humanities have become useless - they've always been. The big shift is that the university has become a vocational school. They have become, what used to be the technical and trade colleges, a replacement for the lifetime learning on the job condensed in a few years for the unwashed masses. In this neo-liberal meritocracy or ours (jk), people are widgets, and they need to be jiggered correctly so they can be slotted in to the correct spot and be useful for society. If you explained 150 years ago to Winthrop that in 2015 farmer Joe would send his kids to Harvard to learn how to operate some new fangled bleepy bloopy thingie (aka programming a computer), he'd think your nuts.

Yes, the infantile mental state of many humanities professors is baffling. I guess they dedicate themselves to their work because they are passionate about the content, yes, reading&thinking is fun! Some may even think they are useful. "I teach my students to think critically"! As if physics professor or your uncle cannot do that. "I teach my students to understand systemic societal problems!" Sure, but your adherence to those shift with the winds of political expedience, your own age and experience, and maybe that movie you once saw. But what they are really doing is that they've taken up the scraps of a role that no longer exists.

IMO, the humanities have a big place in the University - a place for "higher" learning. It elevates us over the day-to-day drab of doing errands and keeping your shoelaces tied, they connect us to some of the most wonderful human achievements of the past. But it is not useful, and has never been so.

The side effect of creating highly-paid, highly-educated clergy was that smart people who don't have to worry much about feeding themselves tend to do interesting things. It's something we've lost today, and I think it's a big part of why basic research is in trouble today - because science doesn't usually pay off in short term, and is best done by people who are free to do whatever catches their interest. This is also not compatible with the new "neo-liberal university-as-a-trade-school".

You couldn't be more wrong about that. Humanities, liberal arts education are the most useful parts of education (and I say this as an engineer). The reason why, through the ages ruling classes educated themselves in philosophy, history, literature, is that it shows you how this world really works, how politics is done, what separates rulers from ruled, what are the basic human rights. Greek and Latin, which you consider useless as well were key to this, because up to Enlightenment era most important papers were written in those languages (either by Plato and Aristotle or by Cicero, or medieval philosophers)

Lower classes were allowed to educate in some practical matters, like medicine, architecture, geography, etc. but studying liberal arts was forbidden by law (e.g. in ancient Rome), because there is nothing worse, from master's point of view that the slave with sense of entitlement, fighting for hers human and political rights.

Democracy arose about the time when humanities education became common enough - because it became hard for people to settle for less than the freedom.

Now, in 21st century we see opposite trend: people are encouraged to study STEM fields, completely ignoring history, literature and philosophy, which basically makes them highly skilled puppets. Which of course is welcomed by ruling class of our times.

> IMO, the humanities have a big place in the University - a place for "higher" learning. It elevates us over the day-to-day drab of doing errands and keeping your shoelaces tied, they connect us to some of the most wonderful human achievements of the past. But it is not useful, and has never been so.

How can it be that there is no use in being "elevated" or in being connected to "the most wonderful human achievements of the past"?

I guess you're right, I formulated that too flippantly. I meant, they have no use in the utilitarian sense, in the neo-liberal university-as-a-trade-school.

I guess because the wonder of human achievement only matters in so far as it can be turned into the wonder of inflowing dollars. Seriously, the more efficient our economy becomes, the more it sucks the life itself out of everything. Dreaming, big or small, is not profitable.

> Now the writing is on the wall, humanities "uselessness" is almost unanimous. That's a shame, but maybe that causes things to change for once.

The wrong perception of humanities being useless is so embedded into today's culture that it would take a cultural change to fix it. And even changing the culture within a university is prettymuch an impossible task for one person.

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