Comment by tjic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tjic | Hacker News Reader

Speaking as someone who double-majored in computer science and a humanity (history) at a top-tier university, I think that the humanity degree should be firmly classified as entertainment, or enrichment.

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.

So true.

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.

I read a very disturbing argument once which comes back to me when discussing what higher ed does and does not do. Paraphrased:

"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."

Even sadder is that IQ doesn't correlate to happiness or success nearly as well as the ability to defer gratification.

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.

> 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.

I also don't know of any evidence that it can be taught, but it strikes me as teachable. Patience, kindness, politeness, etc are all teachable modifications of our natural instincts.

The original kids in the study were 4 years old.

> The higher educational system is the only authority in America which is socially permitted to discriminate based on IQ

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'm so glad I learned this lesson quickly.

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.

Odd. My experience is just the opposite.

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.

Well, everything you learn in a 4-year humanities degree, you can learn in your free time when you're in high-school. English? History? That's not Quantum Field Theory. You don't need 10 years of training to learn humanities. Just grab a bunch of books and read that while you're a child / teenager because children and teenagers do have the time for it.

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.

I'm with logjam on this one. I double-majored in Computer Science and Theatre, and while I do now use my Computer Science degree to make money, I don't believe I learned almost anything in my computer science classes that I couldn't have learned - and mightn't have learned better - either (a) on the job somewhere out of high school or (b) on my own through books and online resources.

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.

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