In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If you're rich, and have $40 (or $140k) and four years of your life to devote to it, then, by all means, go get a humanities degree.
I think that it's just as useful and enriching as spending $140k and four years learning to become an expert windsurfer, or skateboarder, or glass blower.
However, for anyone who doesn't consider $140k and 4 years "discretionary entertainment budget", then a humanities degree is a huge waste.
People justify humanities degrees as teaching you "how to think" or "how to write".
Hogwash.
Most engineers that I know think far, far, far better than most humanities majors. The humanities only rarely require critical thinking. Further, they don't even train you, in any real sense, how to reason by analogy or how to write well. At most, they filter the folks who already know how to do these things.
Having attended an Ivy League school and seen both types of education, I would not recommend the humanities to anyone other than idle children with trust funds.
I'd been happy if the education system pick a side and either focus on career preparation or humanity enrichment. But nowadays it pretends to do both and failed at them miserably.
Thus I can't help but think that the system is just a giant marketing scheme to make $140 off a hardworking family.
"The higher educational system is the only authority in America which is socially permitted to discriminate based on IQ, via entrance requirements. This is pretty useful, and accordingly everyone else pays them astounding amounts of money to do it. Given that they have a monopoly on discriminating based on IQ, they don't need to do anything else well."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_gratification
See also the marshmallow test on that page. Too bad we don't (systematically) teach our kids stuff like this along with the regular curriculum.
I know of no evidence that delaying gratification can be taught with any degree of effectiveness. The original study used babies, who were later tracked through (well-predicted) success or failure in life. Control of one's impulses appears to be a very basic "brain organ" with rather limited capacity for training.
The original kids in the study were 4 years old.
The famous lawsuit which resulted in this situation:
http://supreme.justia.com/us/401/424/case.html
That is when employers were officially prohibited from using IQ tests. Our current situation is a direct result of this.
I went to a liberal arts college to be an English major.
First term freshman year, I also took a math class. It took about 6 days to change my mind. Who knows what my life would have been like if I hadn't.
I think you might have been more content at a trade school, not University. They have different goals. Pressure to dumb down the University to serve as simply a cog feeder for business has always been there.
I have a degree in biochemistry, formal and informal training in computer science, a minor in English, fluency in a foreign language I learned at university...and then this silly professional degree.
My science and professional degree == the critical thinking skills I frankly could have obtained, free of charge, learning automotive repair at my local community college.
Humanities work == understanding and appreciation for how different people(s) think, exposure to the "why" rather than just the "how", development of a yearning to create, deep appreciation for the things that make life just a bit more than our checking accounts: reverence for nature, beauty, compassion, truth.
And yeah, an ability to think far more critically about things a little heavier than syntax errors, an ability to weigh evidence, work with these nebulous, imperfect, non-Platonic things called people, and make correct, critical decisions that incorporate science, ethics, economics - choosing harder rights over easier wrongs.
To paraphrase a fellow Dead Poet, there's a hell of a lot of 6 inch pipe to lay out there. It will pay well. You'll revel in the comforting, solid duality of pipe and wrench.
You may come to that end pipe cap wondering if that was all.
I advocate more math for everyone: if the "soft" majors like humanities and economics were humiliated on a daily basis with math problem sets, they probably would grow to be more humble, logical and (nasty side-effect) bitter people. Mathematicians and natural scientists do know how hard it is to actually KNOW something, how to try to falsify your own hypotheses, etc. That makes one a better citizen than knowing Japanese, Literary Criticism or why the French Revolution happened.
History is really interesting! Seriously! Why wait until you're 18 to study it when you can read about the Greeks and Romans when you're 10? I loved History when I was a kid. Humanities education is vital, but it should be cherished and nurtured and provided to students between the ages of 10-18. That would be possible if most people didn't put their brains on hold during high-school.
The creative and teamwork experiences I got on the theatre side of things, however, are absolutely tangibly valuable to me now in my day-to-day dealings with coworkers (current and potential). Did a humanities degree "teach me how to think"? No. Did it provide me with several different ways of thinking, and help me appreciate better how different my natural thought processes might be from those of other people? Absolutely. I'm sorry, but there are in fact a lot of very narrow, closed off, fit-the-stereotype maladjusted computer professionals out there, and yes, they're unpleasant to work with. Becoming more socialized is a perfectly valid thing to expect out of an education, and a humanities degree certainly puts focus there that doesn't exist in more technical degrees.
Of course, the fact that my particular theatre program was filled with enthusiastic, smart, engaging professors who encouraged lively participation, debate and creativity while the computer science program was nearly lifeless has probably colored my perceptions, but I imagine that paradigm is not limited to the university I attended.
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/10/the_myth_of_th...
DeRose is a good analytic philosopher and I always enjoy reading him, so thanks for the link.
Not that all continental philosophy is crap (existentialism seems interesting and worthwhile) but a lot of it is, and in many circles, a low opinion of Hegel gets you a lot of credit.
If all you have to offer is intangible benefits, then you are welcome to all the intangible support from the taxpayer you want!
In contrast, someone with a scientific or engineering degree and fluency in a foreign language or the ability to write well, has a very good chance of never being out of demand.
The problem isn't with liberal arts skills, it's with students who pursue them to the exclusion of -- rather than in addition to -- more practical curricula that are actually desired by employers.
People that only know how to program Video Card Drivers can make a fair amount of money. So, people who know how to program and also know about the big, wide real world don't make that much more on average.
It can probably marginaly increase their income, but once you make 90k there is not much room for meaningful improvement on average.
"They want me to be a "well-rounded" engineer. Well, I know vector calculus, finite algebra, compiler theory, and enough quantum mechanics to know a little about what's going on under the silicon. Is that not well-rounded enough?"
Foreign language + Generic Office Worker = Extraordinarily Valuable Generic Office Worker as long as you have the right language pair for your employer.
One of my best friends sells water meters. You don't have to be particularly expert to start selling water meters on the ground floor, and he wasn't, but after a few decades of it he is fairly good at selling water meters. He is also the only person in metropolitan Nagoya who can explain what a magnetic flowometer is in English, Japanese, and Spanish, and has a career of being flown out to various big customers abroad and explaining how good their flowometers are and why you want to go for magnetic or acoustic instead of the competition's inferior mechanical models.
Your paper must be at least $N pages long, and must cite at least $P primary sources and $S secondary sources.
Writing papers which are as concise as possible (without being unreadable) and minimize external dependencies is a skill I learned in math graduate school:
Your paper has been automatically rejected due to a length greater than 4 pages.
While interesting, your paper will only be accepted if you clarify the following unclear points.
I learned more about good english writing (as opposed to writing content-free puffery) from coding than I did from humanities classes.
It strikes me as obvious that critical thinking ability is best trained with math.
Civic and historical knowledge can be learned much like any specific skill can.
So it wood seem the humanities are a very round about way of teaching critical thinking. But I think the last paragraph strikes at a core truth rarely spoken out loud:
That may be unfortunate but inevitable, Mr. Kronman said. The essence of a humanities education — reading the great literary and philosophical works and coming “to grips with the question of what living is for” — may become “a great luxury that many cannot afford.”
Within the above paragraph is the hard truth that a humanities education is most often a way to show off class and breeding. Class and breeding are highly correlated with wealth.
Writing a cogent and convincing argument is not a problem that can be solved with linear algebra. Ethics is not the differential equations of competing interests. That you would consider a good math education to be a core component of critical thinking appears to serve as an example proof of why engineers are poorly trained in critical thinking skills.
Ethics is a set of rules, critically occupied with filtering out simple egoistic urges from greater human goals.
I think you're confusing critical thinking with empathy and emotional insight.
To understand humans, you have to understand our emotions and that requires empathy. Combine empathy with critical thinking and you can have insights about our emotional lives.
Engineers are not poorly trained in critical thinking skills, quite the opposite.
Some engineers are very empathic people. A few seem to posses a distinct lack of empathy and little intuition as to how other feel. But those individuals are rare and not confined to engineering.
Convincing arguments depend on who you're trying to convince, know your audience. The same argument won't convince engineers and astrologists.
Any good engineer has excellent communication skills, they wouldn't be a good engineer otherwise. And cogent convincing arguments are an intimate part of every engineer's life.
The study of math, physics, logic, will greatly improve your ability to come up with convincing arguments.
As will the study of history, philosophy, rhetoric, and psychology. Let's be honest here. Physics has no place in that list, logic is a subset of math, and a strong case could be made that math is just applied philosophy/epistemology (and the reverse is also true.) There is a reason that math is considered a liberal art and not an engineering discipline...
There is a difference between real "higher math" and the applied math that engineering students learn as a part of their vocational training. The former is useful for enhancing critical thinking, the latter is not.
Good Will Hunting rebuts this quite well:
You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.
A humanities education is not a luxury that no one can afford. A humanities degree is.
EDIT: These are incredibly valuable, far more than any kind of job-training education. BUT, that's assuming that's what you actually get. Based on my knowledge of universities... that's not what you get.