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Comment by PunchTornado | Hacker News Reader

> even a Physics student will take some liberal arts classes as electives

ok, yes, STEM students study a little bit liberal arts

> generally not the case that a student of Fine Arts is going to take Calculus

But now you're asking a liberal arts student to study Calculus and derivatives, which are not easy topics and not something that useful in day to day life.

This is a blatantly double standard in your argument. Few STEM students go that deep in liberal arts to the "level of Calculus". It's like asking a STEM student to read Kant.

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"level of Calculus" is not very deep, Calculus is a first year college math course at best, most who study stem take it already in high school, it is hard to get much shallower than that and still call it a college course.

one could say Kant isn't very deep either, you study in your first year philosophy. but few STEM students know about it.

Unlike Kant, knowing calculus will help you with balancing books. (And many other useful real world stuff.)

If you want to add something useful to the mix, try law, ethics (technically a subset of philosophy), logic (as analysis and rationality, manipulation) and acting. Group work can be exercised in any field, therefore including basic management.

> knowing calculus will help you with balancing books.

How? I can see how calculus is used in quantitative finance, but double-entry bookkeeping predates the invention of calculus.

I did basic accounting without needing any calculus. In fact I only used calculus after trying some machine learning. 90% of the population doesn't use calculus in their life.

Maybe my education doesn't mirror most STEM people's, but I took philosophy, literature, history, etc. courses as part of my Bioengineering degree. I could also take capstone courses from various arts programs as electives, despite them being "deep in liberal arts". I enjoyed those courses for the most part, and I think we should have STEM students reading Kant. I don't agree with the STEM or nothing argument, but baseline statistics and classical science should be a requirement for everyone.

In my experience, the double standard usually goes the other way.

Many of the liberal arts electives I could choose from (as a physics major) were foundational requirements in that major. For example, in a literature class I took, the instructor was surprised many of us had not also taken Literary Criticism 101.

On the other hand, an English major friend of mine was able to take a physics course nicknamed "Physics for Poets", where rounding g to 10m/s/s was acceptable.

>But now you're asking a liberal arts student to study Calculus and derivatives, which are not easy topics and not something that useful in day to day life.

Calculus is a high school subject where I live, at least single variable calculus, it's not that hard.

neither is Kant or Marx, both studied in high school where I live, but STEM students usually know nothing about it.

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