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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> The other thing we ask students to do, beyond merely encountering these things is to use them to practice argumentation, to reason soundly, to write well, to argue persuasively about them.

If the purpose of teaching the humanities is to teach kids sound reasoning, good writing, and effective persuasion, then why is so little of that evident today when more kids than ever go to college?

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> "If the purpose of teaching the humanities is to teach kids sound reasoning, good writing, and effective persuasion, then why is so little of that evident today when more kids than ever go to college?"

The answer is simple: "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink." Even here on HN, we have a large number of people saying that going to college is merely to get a credential and that they didn't learn (or, more accurately, didn't bother to learn) anything of importance there.

Then maybe we shouldn't be spending billions of dollars leading a bunches of horses that aren't thirsty to water.

I don't buy it either. Some people are just inherently more rationally grounded, I suspect in large part due to their personalities. I doubt that if you were to take a student who doesn't possess these traits, that they would look any different at the end of four years.

I also suspect that you get a lot more bang for your buck focusing on teaching kids how to reason, write, and persuade by teaching those skills specifically as opposed to hoping they pick it from transfer learning in an English or history class.

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