This article has some good points but is a bit meandering. The best point is right there at the beginning: the humanities study things which are not (entirely) subject to scientific rigor, but which are still worth studying. This sort of begs the question, why is anything worth studying?<p>I think Francis Bacon made the best point about this: knowledge—real knowledge—is about the ability to reliably recreate some effect. With something like the material characteristics of a metal, we can use the rigor of experiment to figure out how to create metals with desired characteristics. We subject the metal to varying levels of heat, pressure, etc. and see what happens.<p>With governments this is basically impossible. You can't run controlled experiments against governments that are similar in all aspects but one. <i></i>But it is still useful to study governments<i></i> if we want to design good ones. You can make a good argument that much of America's success is the result of the Founding Fathers studying the many forms of government that preceded them.<p>I would argue all other humanities are essentially the same. Literature and philosophy are collections of "experiments" conducted and suppositions made by our predecessors about how to live good lives. English composition is about how humans can effectively communicate in that language. Etc, etc. Are the various stories, rules of thumb, and bits of wisdom in these disciplines scientifically rigorous? Of course not. They can't be. But they can still improve our odds of reproducing some desirable effect, and that makes them knowledge worth having.
What gets me the wrong way about these arguments, and it is even itself addressed somewhat in the article is the reduction of 'the humanities' to formal or academic study.<p>The ideal of the humanities and of the holistic, cosmopolitan citizen with a broad education in every field of human activity is not new. Humboldt (and others) formulated it long ago.<p>In that sense I think the humanities aren't just needed in education. They're needed in churches, in political debates, in homes and families. Humanities as a practice rather than as a four-year degree.<p>If you really want to democratice and popularize the humanities don't treat them as a grooming mechanism for leaders or an intellectual exercise as is common in the anglosphere, but as a part of everyday life.
apart from the benefit of the humanities in an undergraduate education, there are big positive externalities from the scholarly work as well.<p>for instance, even if most people never read any of the written work of historians, the existence of that community and its scholarly standards helps prevent a lot of bizarre, erroneous historical narratives from gaining traction, and society is much better off for it.
<i>The great rush of STEM funding that has slowly marginalized the humanities within our education system</i><p>STEM funding doesn't marginalize the humanities; there's no reason STEM funding needs to reduce the value of a humanities degree or needs to decrease the number of people majoring in the humanities.<p><i>The core of teaching in the humanities is the expression of the grand breadth of human experience</i><p>There is a lot of motte and baileying (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy</a>) among humanities defenders: the humanities are hugely important, but the way they're practiced by many in contemporary universities is not so good. Harold Bloom called the current practice "The School of Resentment," but it goes under other monikers as well.<p><i>The other thing we ask students to do, beyond merely encountering these things is to use them to practice argumentation, to reason soundly, to write well, to argue persuasively about them</i><p>This is good! But many humanities professors now think they have the answer, and their job is to become activists, spreading the answer they've found to everyone else.<p>There are two big problems with getting students and grad students to major in the humanities: the cost of college is one, and the way the humanities have largely morphed into a particular form of political activism is the other. The humanities as learning "to practice argumentation, to reason soundly, to write well, to argue persuasively about them" is and would be great. The experience on the ground is quite different.<p>I majored in English and went to grad school in it: <a href="https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-before-you-start-grad-school-in-english-literature-the-economic-financial-and-opportunity-costs/" rel="nofollow">https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befo...</a>. Here is one version, albeit not the only one, of the intellectual problems that occur widely: <a href="https://jakeseliger.com/2014/10/02/what-happened-with-deconstruction" rel="nofollow">https://jakeseliger.com/2014/10/02/what-happened-with-decons...</a><p>I forgot to add: I used to try and keep a list of examples of the kind of thing one sees in the humanities, but Real Peer Review does it better: <a href="https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview</a>.
> The other thing we ask students to do, beyond merely encountering these things is to use them to practice argumentation, to reason soundly, to write well, to argue persuasively about them.<p>If the purpose of teaching the humanities is to teach kids sound reasoning, good writing, and effective persuasion, then why is so little of that evident today when more kids than ever go to college?
The trivium and quadrivium are the foundation that, to me, ties the importance of the humanities into the non-humanties areas of study. It has a compounding effect on not just breadth, but also depth of knowledge, and in particular, offers greater potential for novel insights over "1 mile deep, but one inch wide" knowledge.
I watched an a documentary about early humans a couple weeks ago, and felt really grateful that we have people passionate enough to dedicate their lives to learning about our ancestors. On one hand, it would be really heartbreaking if the number of people deeply focused on the humanities starts to dwindle, and our culture gets more and more monotonous. On the other hand, maybe this shift could cause us to automate more of the boring parts of this research or discover new research tools that wouldn't be possible otherwise.<p>It'd be a lot easier to justify a humanities education if it resulted in a high-paying job. Just image a Udacity for the humanities where the end of the program resulted in a career coach helping you get a $300k job as a historian. To me, that is truly utopian.
> Does anyone look at the present moment and conclude that we have an over-abundance of humble, empathetic, well-trained and effectively communicating leaders?<p>Yet do we have a dearth of leaders with experience in the humanities? Just doing a quick look at the current politcal leadership, and Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi both have a degree in political science. Trump has a degree in economics, but Obama and George W. Bush both majored in the humanities. [Edit: I thought I'd take a look at the past three vice-presidents as well - Pence, Biden, and Cheney all majored in the humanities.]<p>Saying that these qualities are important is fine, but one has to consider whether or not the current way that academia teaches the humanities is a good way to instill them in people. If something doesn't achieve its goal, then it doesn't matter how lofty said goal is.<p>I'm constantly impressed by how articles like these claim that studying the humanities will give people a better way to question things and think critically about the world around them, but then fail to do so themselves.
The article suggests that many of the current fields of humanities are markers of wealth and status symbols, and that we need to move away from this. That may be true but a bigger problem to me is that the modern humanities have fragmented into many narrowly focused sub fields, which seem to be based on presuppositions about how the world works. These fields seem less like a legitimate area of study and more like pseudoscientific political tools, often working to legitimize perspectives that aren’t grounded in reality, and radicalizing students and our culture as a result. The grievance studies have drastically undermined the legitimacy of the humanities as a whole even though “core humanities” may not deserve the same critique. Unfortunately even though much has been written on this issue (<a href="https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/" rel="nofollow">https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...</a>), I don’t see it affecting the momentum of these dubious programs at modern universities.
Very old debate. Famous 1959 essay by Brit CP Snow about the two cultures of STEM and humanities leading to misunderstandings between the two. UK colleges pretty much tracked you into one of the two cultures with little exposure to the other.
What about the opportunity cost of studying the humanities as opposed to science or engineering? This a question for the individual. As a boy I fell in love with Orwell which led me to strongly appreciate literature.<p>Now a little older I realize what is actually meant by "knowledge is power." Knowledge is a lever. When you're young there's absolutely nothing you can do of any consequence because you live inside someone else's bounds. In a modern economy it's not enough to produce a bushel of corn a day to feed one person. To operate in the economy as anything more than a consumer requires levers in the form of skills, experience, education, and knowledge. Otherwise, you live off the fat of our capitalistic system as some unimportant facilitator, or entirely as a consumer.<p>Knowledge in the sciences and engineering effectively makes the individual more than what he's worth in just labor. You can effectively leverage our modern day infrastructure of virtually infinite water, electricity, materials, connectivity, and information to do more than what a person in the past could only accomplish with their hands and feet.<p>What is worthwhile in the humanities preferable to understanding the power of technology and being able to create objective value in society?
Some people have always hated the humanities, nothing to new there.<p>But what <i>seems</i> new is the humanities coming into politics in what <i>seems</i> like a big way.<p>It's gone from what you should think, to what you have to think.<p>That's why I think it should be smashed.