We study humanities to help us realize that the values we collectively hold didn't come from nowhere, and that those are the things we should really be analyzing and questioning. You don't get that in a statistics course. And through studying thoughts on the big questions of life from people in different contexts from us, we can gain power to decide for ourselves what makes life meaningful. Or is education only useful if it makes us a better cog in the globalized economic machine?
To the extent we require people to go to school for a big chunk of their life, and spend hundreds of billions of tax dollars per year on it, this should be the only function of at least a public education.
If people want to think about the “big questions” they should read the Iliad or the Bible or whatever of their own volition.
From my experience, I think it more likely that liberating a student from the prejudices ingrained in them by their previous environment simply opens the way for different prejudices to be injected into the void.
I am thankful that I was able to recognize the abuses of academia before allowing myself to get pulled into the Ivory Tower's stairmill-powered meat grinder. I still have to do stupid useless crap sometimes, but I actually get paid for that.
I believe we end up with a healthier society if we teach people diverse topics and introduce them to new ideas in an intellectually safe environment. Contrast this with going to school to double down on whatever you thought in high school and I hope you can see a benefit beyond pure economic gain.
In a democracy everyone should think about the "big questions". If we optimize for brainless robot workers then why ask them for input on how to run our society?
I do not think that means what you wrote. I've seen "intellectually safe", and it gets converted to "I accept nothing outside of my bubble". Worse yet, students get actively hostile to foreign ideas.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/safe-spaces-college-int...
I think the better term is "intellectually rigorous". Let people have opposing views, but instead challenge them on logos, ethos, and pathos. That discussion is where the truth lies.
That's great you have this "belief." But we spend $600 billion per year on education in this country. We make kids spend most of their childhoods chained to a desk learning about a variety of things teachers "believe" will help them that they'll never use in their lives. As a taxpayer and a parent, I want this whole expensive, time-consuming endeavor to be based on more than "belief."
Just watch a politician speak sometime: education is billed to the public as a way to help the economy and make sure people have jobs. If you told parents: we want you to spend all this time and money helping your kids learn "how to think" (oh and by the way, it will be based on vague humanistic values that may be quite different from what you would have taught your kids), then you wouldn't get very many people to sign up. And that's an incredibly dishonest thing to do.
What kind of a return do we get on that 600bn?
Personally I think part of the value of education is that it does teach students things their parents wouldn't. Why should children learn only from their parents?
You're going to have to be more specific than putting words in the mouth of a hypothetical politician for me to find your argument remotely compelling. As a member of the public and a consumer of public education I do not consider it to be only job training or a way to support the economy. There are less tangible benefits, especially in higher education.
Here's just one bigger picture thought to consider. For a reasonably motivated and bright person, it's pretty easy to teach yourself programming (I'd be willing to bet most people on this forum are self-taught). And, after you get some basics, pretty easy to teach yourself nice tidy applied math-y things like Bayesian reasoning. Likewise it's easy to teach yourself science. One reason why is that in every case you can self-correct: the program doesn't work, the calculation is wrong, the world says otherwise.
That simply isn't the case with the humanities. You need the guidance of an expert for a while.
I'll leave it at that for now, just noting that to the extent humanities help with "analysis" it's probably going to be especially beneficial with messy, open problems where even the criteria for success may be vague and shifting. Thinking critically about product design rather than improving an algorithm, to bring it into HN.
When a literature class reads a novel, the professor doesn't just teach students to accept the words as they are. The students are encouraged to interpret and to understand how the author's thoughts originated, and then to extrapolate how that might be applicable in a modern context. Even the worst literature classes I've taken were taught like this.
When a math class is introduced to a new theorem, a professor will often breeze through the derivation of it (if you're lucky). This just trains students to find the right order of manipulations that solves the equation, rather than to understand what the equation and its transformations really represent. Sure, some classes at some schools might be better than this, but there are plenty more who aren't.
That knowledge is a very important input to any logical or statistical analysis, or resulting system, that affects people's lives.
It just may not be important for someone tasked creating a Bayesian model.
History is especially important for people to learn because without it, history can be (and is) used as a tool by those who have studied it against them.
Also, it seems a bit silly to say we should teach Bayesian reasoning instead of the classics, considering Bayes himself studied the classics.
Simply producing more STEM graduates does not necessarily lead to better results when so many of them sell out to companies with business models that are adversarial to humanity at large.
Perhaps reading Plato or Marcus Aurelius could lead those graduates to take a more ethical approach in their technological endeavors.
Teaching classics teaches you how to analyze writing. Writing written by people with a vastly different perspective, culture, and assumptions then your own. (This is also why I think that limiting it to Western European classics is bullshit.) We spend a lot of time reading and writing, and very little of what we produce or consume can be distilled down to chains of logical statements.
It's not going to help you derive Kepler's laws of planetary motion, or figure out how to use the new flavour-of-the-week web framework, and that's fine.
Right, a different set of axioms.
Any sort of analysis will, ultimately, be a series of arguments using the text and the set of axioms you mentioned.