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Comment by martindbp | Hacker News Reader

The whole education system and its purpose is crumbling. Not just the universities but all the way down to preschool. It started with the internet, gained steam with top notch content being available on YouTube, and it's properly dying with the advent of AI.

If the purpose is to learn, you can do it better with YouTube and AI. If the purpose is to have fun, socialize and network, that is better done elsewhere, doing sports or other hobbies with other people. If it's babysitting you need, there are cheaper, better and more fun ways for the kids to spend their days. If the purpose is to learn a job, again, education is a terribly wasteful way of achieving that.

Then there's the fact that we'll all soon have to come to terms with, which is that most people are already barely able to contribute value to a white collar job, and in 20 years I'm pretty sure that number will be down 99%.

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> If the purpose is to learn, you can do it better with YouTube and AI.

I’d argue that is true for STEM but not for humanities.

Then they simply do not matter.

If you’re saying humanities don’t matter because you can’t learn them on YouTube or via ai slop then that’s a very sad point of view.

Don't matter for what: thinking, aesthetic appreciation, insights on humanity, knowledge of what came before, understanding current events, questioning the status quo, what is it that they don't matter for?

It's questionable that the humanities teach thinking. This stream of essays by humanities profs isn't a good advert for their own thinking abilities, let alone their ability to teach it. In fairness this specific article isn't too hard on the phones, but the essay could have been shrunk to one sentence: we aren't allowed to fail students so they see no reason to study. That the entire explanation needed. Everything else is just flavour.

So if they're all about teaching how to think, where are the brilliantly thought out ideas for tackling their problem? Surely that's where their own skills should be valuable?

How is that your takeaway??

I pulled out trend lines of capability and made projections from this, and easily avoided the red meat of testing and humanities.

They don’t have a solution, because it’s a system level issue - well beyond what teachers, who are already underfunded, can do.

This is the alarm bell being rung.

If coming up with systems-level solutions to systems-level problems isn't what learning how to think means, then what does it mean?

> It's questionable that the humanities teach thinking.

Philosophy is an obvious counter to that claim. It's hard to see how anyone could major in a humanities and not think, even with LLMs. But perhaps the problem is thinking that requiring everyone to take a sampling of intro humanities courses will force them to think instead of just getting by.

> we aren't allowed to fail students so they see no reason to study.

But that wasn't the issue previously for a majority of this professor's 30 years teaching, it's something that changed recently.

The discussion in almost every post on HN that's about humanities topics reminds me how much they do, most of all to those who think they don't.

To be blunt, the current economic value of the humanities is pretty low, just like STEM as developed by humans will be in the future. I think universities may play a role in the future, but more as something people do for fun as a hobby, and not mainly for its superior teaching capability, but for the social experience.

    > To be blunt, the current economic value of the humanities is pretty low,

Oh it's pretty high, especially when people fail to realize the meaning of tariffs, what's inflation, how the government works and the role of due process.

The bill usually comes due when we faithfully recreate failures of the past while failing to learn from others' experiences in the present.

There are two types of people in the world; those who can understand the humanities without the help of an instructor, and those who are incapable of putting such abstract knowledge to good use. Zero overlap.

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