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Humanities Will Not Save Education [1]

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Date: 2023-01-06

This post feels a little bit like kicking a person when they are down, but I think the recent discussion of the death of humanities is missing something. It is important to note that many areas of humanities are being gutted, and that this is a real and important loss to higher education and society at large. This ACOUP post, for example, does a good job laying the issue out in detail with respect to history. (By the way, if you are not reading Dr. Devereaux, you should. He is an extraordinary teacher. I wish I'd had him in school, but I, and you, can have at least some of him now.)

But often there seems to be an assumption that the mere presence of humanities somehow guarantees, or at last makes it more likely, that students will be wiser for the experience. This is, bluntly, nonsense. The humanities gave us the Dunning School of history, dedicated to the proposition that Confederacy was the correct side in the Civil War and all the evils associated with that notion. Effective Altruism is the creation of moral philosophy. Peter Thiel and the noxious little anti-democracy trolls that surround him think of themselves as philosophers and study history, law and philosophy. No wisdom there.

Nothing in the study of humanities magically imparts wisdom. In some ways, humanities, because some of the disciplines are subjective in nature, can resist wisdom, or at least the idea of challenging your own preconceptions. The scientific method, the idea of testing ideas to breaking, can be better suited to achieving wisdom.

But do not pat yourself on the back, my dear STEM friends. It can lend itself to such endeavors, but there is no guarantee that it will. For each example above, I can give you plenty of examples of scientific progress being resisted by scientists because the results did not align with the prejudices of the leading scientists of the time. Or I could just point to people rapturously worshiping Elon Musk for doing things like the Hyperloop which is a subway, except worse. No, there is no guarantee of wisdom in the scientific method.

The issue, then, is deeper than that of just the decimation of humanities. The entire notion of education is under attack. It has been devalued to nothing more than a means of transferring the cost of job specific training from businesses to students. I am a programmer by career choice and an engineer by training, so I understand that some degrees involve learning specific skills. But the notion that education should be nothing more than that is a recipe for the end of all education.

Every job that cannot eventually be replaced by automation requires some measure of communication, critical thinking, and information synthesis. You need the skills learned in humanities and sciences to do those things. Engaging with an ever more complicated world requires the same. What is happening to the humanities will eventually happen to the sciences. If college is nothing more than a job training program, then as the fashion in jobs changes, then what colleges teach will change as well.

Defending humanities is not sufficient. We need to push training back on the shoulders of companies, where it belongs, and defend the idea that education is a prep for both that training and for participating in civic life. The mindset that is gutting the humanities will inevitably gut every department. Defending the humanities is undoubtedly important, but we shouldn't lose sight of the larger attack on the underpinnings of the entire educational system.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/6/2144812/-Humanities-Will-Not-Save-Education

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