Have you ever been asked what the Humanities are good for?

[Chiquitita]

Last edited Tue May 31, 2016, 04:31 PM - Edit history (7)

Why do we even need them anymore, since lucrative pursuits such as Tech and Finance are hyped as all-important, while the study of Language, Religion, Music, Art, Philosophy, Literature, and History is portrayed as outdated or elitist, perhaps to justify cutting public funding?


I invite you to imagine someone living with cultural amnesia. This is a person who understands little of her community’s past. She doesn’t have much access to her own ancestors’ notions of their identities, or how their life habits or patterns of thought changed over time. Likewise, the values, ideas, and events that shaped the nation in which she lives are mostly unknown to her.

She’s never been taught to examine her native language or use it expressively in school, much less how to communicate with groups whose languages are different than her own. She lacks formal practice in reason and eloquence. She knows little of global religions. She has never benefitted from the opportunity to reflect deeply on her fears, her sense of justice, or to listen widely to other people's stories for their experiential, emotional content. She hasn’t been introduced to books or other documents that could enrich her interpretation of how she, and others, came to be in the present moment.

No one has shown her how to select artistic models for inspiration or critique, so she hasn’t developed a range of aesthetic appreciation for architecture, visual art, music, or dance, and doesn’t have enthusiasm for those kinds of creativity. She doesn’t write to describe her experiences or to enjoy the challenge of imagining alternative scenarios.

In fact, she has never considered that she could be seeing “reality” through a distorted and partial lens because she hasn't been encouraged to ask herself why she thinks the ways she does or acts according to certain values. All she has learned of how representations of the world can change from different ethnic, racial, gendered, ideological, or otherwise socially stratified perspectives has been picked up by chance, or from commercial or private interests—not provided by schools, museums, libraries, or sponsored cultural events.

Because of her lack of education in the Humanities there is a lot she can’t do. She can’t draw on past wisdom because she doesn’t know how to access the rich trove of cultural artifacts invented by human beings over the centuries, or how to analyze them. She is denied the satisfaction of recognizing the beauty (and sometimes horror) of this inheritance. She doesn’t seek out the unfamiliar. Reaching out to people beyond her circle is also uncomfortable because she’s not well prepared. And, since she only recalls her family’s and her own personal struggles, she is unaware of how their stories relate to broader circumstances and other people or even why that knowledge might be important. Since she is unaccustomed to speculating about the reasons behind her beliefs, she cannot rigorously justify her own ethics or evaluate their implications. Discussing qualitative abstractions like kindness and humor is hard for her too, so she's not practiced in empathy towards others or empowered to improve relationships between groups.

Ultimately, she isn’t capable of envisioning a future that is better than the present as she currently perceives it, nor does she possess the skills to exercise power for the benefit of her community. Cut off from major portions of the legacy of human experience and expression, she is vulnerable to adopting the decisions of powerful and influential people without question. She is isolated, yet lacks autonomy.

The study of the humanities—Language, Religion, Music, Art, Philosophy, Literature, and History—breathes life into material things and imbues our relationships with meaning. These disciplines are the world’s basis for recovering and transmitting the record of human experience to successive generations of people. Along with the Sciences, they are at the historical roots of the modern university. But, in distinction to scientific methods, humanities methods of interpretation raise questions that often don’t have absolute answers. They provide us with logical ways to evaluate patterns of ideas and values, to perceive and analyze trends across time, and to shape reality, that are not easily quantifiable or open to experiment. They are the heart of our collective memory.

Humans have long used the Humanities to document and to refine human perception and behavior. We have used them to inform our judgments, our theories, and to fight for necessary change in our shared social structures and places. We need diversity of thought to solve our problems. Their study produces people capable of communicating across all kinds of borders and envisioning possibilities for a common future. A Humanities education not only satisfies our ancestral intuition that valuing financial gain above all else will not lead us to sustainable happiness. The study of the Humanities is a public trust, crucial to community life, which aspires to educate the whole person and citizen for the benefit of the collective. It is a vital part of an education designed to prepare us to be the 'guardians of our own liberty'.

[Act_of_Reparation]

1. Certainly.

By conservative types who don't like the humanities because it involves critical self-reflection, and from science types who think the work they do is much harder and much more beneficial.

[unblock]

2. ugh. too many words. please put it in outline form and add hyperlinks for keywords? thanks!

[cheapdate]

29. Agree. Ugh. Please reduce to a single-panel cartoon? Thanks!

[sofa king]

60. Heh heh, the moron's mating call.

TLDR! TLDR!

Edit: sorry, Republican lurkers:

TLDR! TLDR!

[Greybnk48]

3. Chiquitita, is this your work?

I would really like to quote this on facebook! Excellent analysis! I wish I could "rec" this more than once!

[Chiquitita]

4. Thanks, yes

I've been working on this for awhile and thought I'd share. You are welcome to use it.

[whatthehey]

5. Winning Pub Trivia Night.

In all seriousness, I have a couple of humanities degrees including an incredibly obscurantist one, and I listen to TMS and TTC lectures in the car for fun, so I appreciate knowledge for its own sake, but to be brutally honest the main practical application I get from that knowledge in daily life is in the flippant title. Yes the Humanities certainly do give the student, formal or informal, all the breadth of insight you describe, but few people, especially among the less well-educated, live lives where that insight is immediately applicable. How many are attempting to "inform our judgments, our theories, and to fight for necessary change in our shared social structures and places?" Not how many could or should but are? In everyday life the Humanities are only useful for those who already have and value the worldview which academic knowledge supports. It's in a sense a self-fulfilling prophecy; if breadth and scope of knowledge are important to you, so are the Humanities, but the reverse is also true.

[Chiquitita]

7. It's great for trivia. A nice bonus.

But also, in my experience teaching, they are a necessary step for people without power or prestige to get a grip on where they are historically, and in terms of decision-making.

I taught at a volunteer university for undocumented students in low-income circumstances whose parents had little access to education. They became empowered to fight for their futures and had the rhetorical skills to do so only after a class on the History of US-Mexico cultural relations. All the SAT prep for math and science in the world couldn't give them that. But that came next and now a lot of them are on scholarship at good colleges.

[flamin lib]

44. Winning Pub Trivia Night

True, but you don't have to have a degree in the Humanities to appreciate the humanities. A single course or two can make a difference in the way an individual evaluates ideas. I have an MBA and haven't studied any poetry since high school, but a six-weeks or two of poetry in high school still made an impact on me that I carry to this day. I never studied physics, but I've watched physics shows on public television and history on the history channel, and each of these things have broadened my horizons and caused me to evaluate certain things in light of the knowledge that I gained from those brief experiences. They make me thirst for more, and so I pick up something esoteric to read from time to time - just because . . . . And what about the theater or the symphony or the ballet I attend from time to time, or just see on television . . . . These beautiful experiences are no less valid if they are experienced through the mass media. I never had the chance to hear Martin Luther King speak, but I've heard his "I have a dream" speech. Haven't you? Didn't it cause you to empathize to some degree with those who shared his dream?
Mrs. Flamin' Lib - my thoughts, not his.

[whatthehey]

50. Sure - but again these are the reflexive priorities I mentioned above

Exposure to them in both formal and informal education will be important to you if breadth of knowledge and cultural appreciation is important to you. I get that. You get that. I think it's fun knowing who was Pope in 1154 or the pederastic obsessions of Tchaikovsky or exactly why the Byzantine Empire fell in 1453 but not before. But that's because I'm a dilettante intellectually. Even where I did get degrees I never became an expert in anything, but concentrated on following a broad curiosity knowing a bit, either a small or large but never huge bit, about as many things as I could. I'm still at it.

But to me that means it's just subjective fun. If I were a golfer I'd enjoy myself hitting golf balls but I'm not. I'm a casual gatherer and synthesizer of bits of learning discovered and exposited by specialists. But from a utilitarian point of view what use is that to me? Beyond pleasure? Sweet FA. I can either impress or annoy the hell out of acquaintances depending on their level of curiosity, and compete fairly well in trivia events that are not dominated by pop culture. That's about it. The Humanities didn't make me able to influence or drive social change, because I haven't (and many who have lack much knowledge in the area). They didn't make me an effective critical thinker because even though I flatter myself into believing I have reasonable enough skill there, the only way those skills are applied is in a quantitative industrial environment where a STEM education has a broader toolkit. On a purely crass level, I get paid because I can solve math problems and apply them to people and assembly lines. I'd have saved time going straight into the MBA thing. Do I wish I had? Hell no, like I said I enjoy broad awareness and knowledge, and that's enough for me. I don't want to justify Humanities knowledge by utility, because to me their uitility is reflexive. They will be important to you if you want knowledge and culktural appreciation in and of themselves, not for what they will grant you the skillset to achieve.

[annabanana]

6. Without them, there is precious little "reach" to exceed

the "grasp"

[gollygee]

8. Once almost all tech work has been automated

the Humanities will be what's left for people to do.

[Chiquitita]

9. that's what an AI person said to me recently...

are you a tech person? He really believed we were headed to what he described as a sort of Utopia. But I thought robots were supposed to save us from long work weeks before and it still hasn't happened. I'm interested to know more about what you and others think of this.

[gollygee]

10. I'm not

My daughter is in a robotics team that has robotics engineers involved and they talk about automation and what's coming. I've read a few news articles about it too. It's cheaper to write a computer program than hire people, so I think it's inevitable. I have no idea if it'll lead to a utopia though. We'd have to completely change our economic system. Automation + our current economic system = a lot of hungry people.

[Chiquitita]

11. I agree with you

As we develop AI and more automation, there ought to be policy recommendations to go along with it.

[JDPriestly]

35. Look at the history of the US from the end of slavery to the Great

Depression.

That technological revolution took a long time, and we don't even think of it as a technological revolution. But it was.

My mother rode horses and walked to her country school in the 1920s. She plowed fields with her feet holding the top of the plow in her hands. The industrial revolution had begun long before she was born, and it continued during her lifetime.

I remember the old hand wringer washers. We hung ALL of our laundry out to dry. It smelled sweet and the cotton was stiff when you brought it in to iron it. Ironing was a big job.

Industry has been moving toward automation for a long, long time.

It is going to happen. I have heard about factories in China being closed and robot factories in Europe and the US being opened in their place. That is happening. It has been announced.

The FDR era brought changes that eased the already occurring movement of masses of people from farming into industrial work and living in cities. People who remain in rural America tend to be politically conservative because they did not join that movement, that physical movement from farm to city, from agricultural work to industrial work. Before Social Security, seniors lived with their children and lived from the production and the income from their farms (or businesses). Social Security and industry pensions made it possible for seniors to survive without the farm income and production. It was a necessary social program to meet the needs of the time.

Now we are facing another huge economic revolution, moving into an era in which technology will result in big social changes. Bernie's ideas are about how we can survive as a society while dealing with a social transformation which is occurring, which we cannot stop, and which requires us to change. Corporations can produce a lot of goods with very little human labor. That trend will become commonplace. Labor costs that are incorporated into the price of goods will diminish. What will happen to the concept of "earning your living"?

That is the question we have to answer. How do we manage a service economy? How do people get the means to pay for what they need in an economy in which work is scarce?

We will need a very different approach to economics.

This is especially true because we will face enormous environmental challenges and if our human population continues to grow as it is, one of them will be quite simply overcrowding in habitable areas.

So we need new thinking to deal with our new economic and social reality.

FDR responded wisely to the changes he saw in his time. We need Bernie because he is the one politician now who is viscerally aware that this is a time of change and, yes, revolution.

Revolution does not come about because people decide to revolt (in my opinion). Revolution comes about because the economic and social reality demands change. Revolution is peaceful when the majority and the leadership realize that the status quo cannot work in the future. Revolution is violent when the majority of the people and the leaders balk, blind themselves and refuse to acknowledge the changing reality.

Political and social revolution is not a matter of choice. It is a necessary response to changes in our economy and society.

[Chiquitita]

36. This is what we need to be thinking about

Thanks for laying it out so clearly. We have to face these changes with new structures, which requires change and creativity, and also kindness. Revolution in the mistaken sense of revolt can sound like just switching who is in power, but the revolution you are describing sounds like healthy evolution.

[JDPriestly]

40. When we resist necessary change, we do violence to ourselves and sometimes to others.

The question is what change and how much of it is necessary? That's what people disagree about -- and certainly no one can say for sure. That's why a democracy should more easily adjust to change than a plutocracy. When those who have to live through the change and with the change choose the change as well as to the extent possible the speed of the change, then we can have a peaceful, or as Bernie would put it, "political" revolution and we don't go through the violence that occurs when people who want at all cost to hold onto a social or economic structure that does not fit a changed reality struggle with people who want change that is too fast.

[jwirr]

43. Be careful what you wish for a Utopia seldom turns out like

one wishes. As to robots helping us with with the long work week. Read: People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy by Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols.

[malthaussen]

55. "Riders of the Purple Wage."

A short story you should read, if you haven't already.

-- Mal

[exboyfil]

56. I should dig up my copy of Dangerous Visions

Phillip Jose Farmer was one of my favorite authors in high school.

[AngryAmish]

12. Humanities were important until they committed suicide in the 80s.

Getting rid if the Canon help kill the university as a serious institution.

[TexasProgresive]

13. You're preaching to the choir, Chiquitita.

It is amazing to me that so many of the young people I know have no, to use your phrase, collective memory. They don't know the stories that shaped us as people, let alone have any sense of history. It's like the people who complained in school, "Why do I need to know (fill in the blank). I'm going to be an engineer, accountant or whatever." have taken over.

The contrast to the rampant ignorance of so many people is apparent if one travels outside the U.S.. My nieces and nephew who grew up in Europe could carry on intelligent conversations and are curious and interested in more than the latest cars, clothes, pop music. It was such a treat to be in their company. On top of that they all are fluent in 5 languages.

[Feeling the Bern]

14. I taught Humanities in IGCSE, A-Level and in university for 12 years

I got that shit all the time.

I heard the same thing about arts and music programs too.

We are raising a generation of good little worker bees who can't analyse, think critically or create.

It's what the owners of the country and the world want.

[padfun]

16. The answer

"It's what the owners of the country and the world want."

This answers all questions on this thread. The "owners" do NOT want people who can think for themselves.

But saying that, there are plenty of young people who can analyze and think critically. In fact, these same things were being said about us when I was young in the late sixties and seventies.

[madinmaryland]

69. "worker bees who can't analyse, think critically or create."...

You bring up an excellent point. A society that does not think, is not a society. We need art, music, understanding of different religions/cultures/ethnicities. These are things that get absolutely no coverage or are laughed at on Fox News and most other right wing media news outlets. There are a lot of creative people that make this country great, who are getting shunted into working as cash register clerks at grocery stores just to make a living.

I am an engineer, and it is amazing how many engineers have absolutely no curiousity about how the world works other than what Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity tells them what to think.

[JDPriestly]

15. Beautiful, amazing post!

Thank you from the depths of my heart.

It's time that your message be heard.

[ewagner]

17. Timely essay

Very timely post...I just read the below referenced essay this morning and it touches on the same theme...

https://aeon.co/essays/why-did-the-secular-ambitions-of-the-early-united-states-fail

Snip

America’s leading 18th-century secularists understood that religion brought a world of ideas – and sometimes a whole social life – as well as political opportunity to Virginians, rich and poor. Very few people would turn their backs on all of this simply out of political principle. The secularists would have to offer real alternatives: schools, libraries, ideas, stories, forms of community, an active and ongoing presence in the lives of Virginians. Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia described a plan by which a system of public schools would replace sacred history with profane history. The schools were to be free, for everyone, for three years. Examinations would find the best students among the poor, and these students could receive more schooling, paid for by the state, through the College of William and Mary. ‘By this means,’ Jefferson wrote, ‘the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish.’

The object was to provide an education suitable for people who must function as citizens. ‘Instead of putting the Bible and Testament into the hands of the children, at an age when their judgments are not sufficiently matured,’ he noted, children should instead receive educations in ‘Grecian, Roman, European, and American history’, Latin, Greek, mathematics, and the sciences. No law, he wrote, was ‘more important, none more legitimate’ than one to provide secular arts and sciences education for the people at large. It would, he wrote, make them effective ‘guardians of their own liberty’.

[flamin lib]

18. I worked in sales to engineers. They all said their technical education prepared them to build

things. I replied that my liberal arts education prepared me to think. Think about what? About not voting against my own interest. Almost to a man (back then it was literally a man) they voted for Reagan and later for Bush.

[Sophiegirl]

25. I worked over 20 years

...at a company composed of elite engineers of every kind imaginable. They were brilliant analysts who could not spell or compose even a simple paragraph. Humanities are not the only things lost in this age of Twitter and text messaging.

[McCamy Taylor]

19. Case in point: Karl Rove. No college so he can only repeat the same old tricks some one else showed

him. Not capable of creative thought. Can not deal with new crises. The only thing he has going for him as a political strategist is his willingness to break the law. Compare to David Axelrod who is his Democratic counterpart. You can see the results of his education in his flexibility and creativity.

[passiveporcupine]

20. My liberal arts education helped me to undertand the mythology behind religion

because it forced me to ask too many questions. It helped me to embrace critical thinking.

It also encouraged my curiosity about everything (especially the sciences), which I can never get enough of. I think liberal arts help instill reflection, curiosity, creativity, and courage to grow and change.

This was a great essay. Thanks so much for posting it.

[Joe Chi Minh]

28. Unfortunately for your world-view, physicists have now

empirically proven that all matter reduces to information - predicating an intelligence - in the event, a seemingly infinite intelligence, such as struck Einstein with such awe.

[Orrex]

21. My English degree enables me to speak eloquently about my inadequate salary.

And I'm a goddamn poet when it comes to lamenting my perennially dismal employment prospects.

[Chiquitita]

22. I'm not convinced that our majors/degrees are at fault for salary disappointment

since plenty of people with Business or Engineering degrees have a hard time getting the jobs they expected too.

http://www.salary.com/8-college-degrees-that-will-earn-your-money-back/slide/10/

English literature majors can earn average starting salaries of $40, 600 according to Payscale.com. That’s a bit lower than the starting salaries for people with more “practical” degrees like accounting or information technology and systems. But the differences in salary start to disappear once people hit the mid-point of their careers, when English majors have average salaries of $76,500, compared to $76,300 for accounting and $76,200 for information technology and systems.

[Orrex]

27. "Can earn." That's a good one.

They can also start at $15,080 per year and stay there.

I can't access that site from work, but I suspect that they're focusing on English lit majors who work in that field, e.g. college-level teaching and/or publishing. Sure, there's also the random CEO now and then who has a masters in Victorian poetry, but that's a rare exception rather than the rule.

But outside of working in the field, I flatly don't believe that an English lit degree does anything to secure employment beyond "check here if you have a college degree" on the application. That is, if the job doesn't require the specific degree, then the specific degree is irrelevant. I know a great many liberal arts majors who've had the same experience.

I'm not as bitter about it as I probably sound, but I can tell you as a stone cold fact that PSU all but assured me that lucrative professional opportunities would fall into my lap thanks to my degree. "A liberal arts degree can take you anywhere," they said.

It's almost comical, in retrospect.


Ultimately you're correct in that a great many factors weigh upon one's salary and employability beyond what's stamped on a paper from the college, but IMO colleges should be required to provide a more honest and objective assessment of the likely value of a given course of study before the student commits to $50K of inescapable debt over it.

[Chiquitita]

32. I majored in comparative literature and Spanish

back in the 80s and didn't get any professional or career help from my University either, not from my departments or the career center. That's the fault of Humanities departments and Institutions that didn't help their students learn to navigate and network beyond the classroom. When did you graduate?

I totally agree with you that Humanities degree granting institutions have a responsibility to guide their students into viable career paths and should absolutely be required to provide these resources. It's comical, but also criminal, or at least incredibly self-serving, not to. I found this for you, though I don't know how good it is (the sell out title is theirs, obviously and meant to be funny I think): http://www.selloutyoursoul.com/2011/12/19/jobs-for-english-majors/

I looked at the Occupational Outlook Handbook too, but it isn't very helpful because you can't search it by the degree, training, or experience you already have, so it leads you to teaching, copywriting, and editing. OOHB links to this which seems more useful: http://www.myskillsmyfuture.org/

Lately I've heard that English majors can find good jobs in tech fields, starting with editing web content, but that may be mythical, I don't know. Most people like me with Spanish degrees combined them with other fields and use their Spanish to broaden networks and be more international.

[Orrex]

33. I would certainly have benefited from a more dedicated study of a second language

I'm the typical monolingual American mutt, so I've just about mastered conversational English, but I'm lost in any more linguistically cosmopolitan discussion.


I've also heard that about tech writing, but when I searched for employment (even freelance) in that arena, I found little more than slave-wage scraps available, and even those had dozens of similarly qualified English majors clambering for them!

[Chiquitita]

34. English majors have declined a lot over the last 10 years in response to what you are experiencing

and professor jobs have gone down likewise. Maybe there is overseas stuff out there if you are up for adventure. Anyway, I wish I had something more helpful than the links above. I'm encouraging my own kids to double major in a science and a humanities, to diversify.

[Orrex]

37. That's a smart strategy

Last edited Tue May 31, 2016, 03:45 PM - Edit history (1)

I started toward a physics degree but changed majors when they had to invent new letters to indicate how badly I scored on tests. But I know a lot of science types, and many of them are atrocious writers, suggesting that there is indeed an occasional demand for people who can who can string a few words together more or less coherently...

We're also trying to get our kids to see the value in a diverse range of study.


Good talk!

[Chiquitita]

39. yes, nice to talk with you.

[jtuck004]

23. Oddly, when we wanted to kill of the people who lived here so we could steal their homes and

property, one of the first things we did was ban their humanities and send them to our schools to learn ours. It's a universal way to insure freedom or slavery , depending on how the majority wants to use it. Even Canada was doing this to the indigenous people after we we had stopped in our country.

The folks around us now are using it to enslave their own young by denying the study of the humanities, schooling instead of educating them.

Another great way to insure subservience.

[Chiquitita]

38. excellent insight

languages, religions, philosophies, ethics, histories -- all cultures have them and pass them on in different ways. Wiping them out is colonization and cultural erasure. Some say (Chela Sandoval, for one) that even some of the privileged started to be 'colonized' by globalization in the 70s and that reducing support for the humanities worked to make them more vulnerable to profit-driven competition as a national value.

[awoke_in_2003]

24. The arts and humanities make us human

I have been a technical person my whole life. I have worked in flight simulation for 20 years. While I was exposed to things in high school, I didn't start delving back in until a decade or so ago. I had to take an art history class at the comm. college, and I dreaded it. It ended up being one of my favorite classes. Heck, I am a Friend of the Kimbell Museum now. I have just started getting into poetry, and have always loved Baroque, Romantic, and Clasical music. Are these things necessary for my life? No. They make life much more enjoyable, though.

[SpankMe]

26. This is a great narrative. Thanks, Chiquitita

I did well in math and science in high school and floundered in English and Humanities. (I went to a private school that required Humanities.) I liked my Humanities class. I just did poorly. I didn't quite "get it".

Then, in college, I took Humanities in order to fulfill some non-engineering elective requirements. (I majored in Aerospace Engineering.) I got an "A" in Humanities. Humanities at the college level hit me in just the right spot. The teacher was great.

I can answer a lot more Jeopardy questions than my peers - all because of Humanities!! (It made me a more well-rounded person, too!)

[REP]

30. Two close friends are senior software engineers at a prominent company.

Their degrees? One: English and Film; the other, Education. Another friend, who retired, has many impressive degrees ... none of them in computer sciences. So maybe think Humanities even if you want to work in software

[pangaia]

31. I can not understand for the life of me how anyone

could feel they have lived a full, meaningful, soul-searching life without having played the 1st timpani part in the 4th movement of Mahler's 1st Symphony.

[KamaAina]

41. The number one major at Yale is history.

I doubt that very many history majors are working as historians.

[hunter]

42. My wife and I have science degrees. Our children have humanities degrees.

They have far better critical thinking skills than many "just the facts, Ma'am" highly technical people I've encountered. They also know the scientific method inside and out and can do the math.

It's also my experience that many "pure" science and mathematics people have a very deep appreciation for the arts and history.

Einstein's humanitarian writing is easily accessible.

I was once personally invited to a hoity-toity humanitarian fundraising dinner by Hans Bethe, the physicist who figured out how the sun and all the other stars in the sky keep shining. He was still doing important work in this field well into his eighties.

I think by the time kids graduate from high school they ought to be literate, numerate, and have generous exposure to the sciences, arts, and humanities.

Science, math, and engineering are arts too. I believe this because the Universe is very very big, and the human mind is very very small. We humans will never truly comprehend any deep truth about our universe, but we can all appreciate our place in it, our very good fortune to exist in this tiny slice of time and space, where we can share beauty, peace, and kindness with others, not even necessarily of the human species, in our ordinary lives.

[flamin lib]

45. Humanities

Lovely, Chiquitita! Thanks for taking the time to express your thoughts so eloquently. I have printed a copy of your post to share with my 14 year old grandson. He's a techie, but also an artist and musician. Perhaps he can be inspired to keep his feet on the ground and his head in the clouds. Chances are he'll be a better man and a more thoughtful person as a result.
Mrs. Flamin' Lib

[nashville_brook]

46. k and r -- from a phil and humanities major :)

[niyad]

47. k and r, with thanks.

[niyad]

48. it certainly helps at "geeks who drink" nights!!

[MadDAsHell]

49. Humanities are great if students take personal responsibility for that choice of major in college.

What grinds my gears is the students who knowingly choose a major with very limited job prospects, then want their loans bailed out down the road when (Surprise!) there are very few job prospects for them.

Go ahead, study what "interests you." But live with your choice and don't dump the consequences on everyone else.

[tenderfoot]

59. "interests" like Language, Religion, Music, Art, Philosophy, Literature, and History?

[MadDAsHell]

62. So you're proposing...what?

Anything?

[tenderfoot]

67. Do you think your English teacher studied law?

Last edited Wed Jun 1, 2016, 05:55 PM - Edit history (1)

Regardless, you sound like your average anti-intellectual. Hence the anger toward the arts, sciences and literature.

[MadDAsHell]

70. And you sound like the typical "everyone else should pay for my mistakes" kind of person.

Again, exactly are you proposing?

[tenderfoot]

72. Free University like the rest of the CIVILIZED world.

eom

[Chiquitita]

64. I think the institutions that grant degrees

have an obligation to guide students onto career paths and that it's a shared responsibility. I'm not sure who these people are who want their loans bailed out. Do you mean students in general or is this related to some campaign promise to a particular group?

[MadDAsHell]

65. I 100% agree with you on the schools; they have responsiblity here too.

For far too long many schools have cared only about bringing in as many students as possible, with no real thought put into jobs for these folks. Both quantity of graduates, and the types of majors they're graduating with, are potential issues in the marketplace.

I'm not talking about any mass movement in terms of students that want to be bailed out, but I know several myself who got degrees in History, Sociology, Philosophy, etc. and basically want forgiveness of those loans now because they're making so little (or never found a job in their field period). It's not that I don't care (they are my friends after all), but they had the same information that I did about those majors in terms of the potential job prospects and earnings. Sort of like smoking. It's been generally known that smoking causes cancer for 50+ years, and many of us avoided it because of that; why do we act like people who started smoking in the last 30-40 years were somehow duped?

[Chiquitita]

66. I see your point

I remember feeling that way back in the 80s, and panicking a bit -- but that was mostly due to the fact that my U (a big ten school) didn't offer any professional or career help (or even undergraduate advising!) back then. The job market changed and the institutions educating people took a while to respond, I think leaving many graduates feeling confused about their prospects.

Its the leaders in the Humanities fields who have the ultimate responsibility to make sure that their fields are accessible and relevant to the larger society. But I agree, we have to be advocates for ourselves at all turns-- like going to the doctor. We can't just put ourselves in others' hands without question.

[zentrum]

52. The Humanities

…...humanize us.

[My Good Babushka]

53. It does seem weird that in the thousands upon thousands of years

of human history, there was time for, and and value to be found in art, literature, and poetry. But now, suddenly, so many are advocating against it.

[exboyfil]

57. How many on a percentage basis had time

for art, literature, and poetry. Remember today's literature (Shakespeare) was the 16th century's movie theater.

Most folks were too busy in mines, farms, and factories to appreciate the humanities.

[My Good Babushka]

58. Those who were able to attain scholarship

and academic studies were encouraged to study art and humanities. They were not actively maligned as they are today. Even peasant classes had music and plays and rituals and folk art. Even prehistoric men had time to draw on cave walls.

[tenderfoot]

68. Several in this thread

It certainly says a lot about them.

[X_Digger]

71. That education was mostly reserved for the gentry.

A well-rounded gentleman needed to be able to discuss the subtleties of Aristophanes' comedies (with other gentlemen in the smoking room.)

It really wasn't about preparing an average person for an average life.

[malthaussen]

54. She is, however, easily controllable.

And ordnung ist alles.

-- Mal

[Bucky]

61. Humanities is good for long thoughtful essays. What good is culture? or literacy?

[Chiquitita]

63. they are forms of capital

having a cultural identity allows us to form collectives, a basis upon which to organize politically and economically. Literacy is a technology that gives us means to store and transmit ideas.