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The Humanities

Firstly, what Michael Bérubé said about “the humanities”.

Second, I’ll just say a lot of what I hear said about humanities versus more technical subjects as an educational endeavor seems to me to be fairly disconnected from reality. If you look around the world, you’ll see that the bulk of what people do in countries that aren’t extremely poor peasant agriculture societies involves human beings communicating with one another. Often in writing. And it’s simply not the case that the United States of America is awash in people who are really great at communicating ideas clearly and concisely in the written format. And yet doing so is useful in a wide array of fields of endeavor. It’s useful even for people primarily in technical fields. And it’s certainly useful in basically every business setting I can imagine. After all, if you have a good idea about anything it’s hard to put that idea to use unless you can communicate it persuasively to other people.

And to get back to the humanities, any effective education in the humanities ought to impart to its students an enhanced ability to communicate ideas clearly. That’s a valuable skill and there’s absolutely no reason to believe “too many” people are acquiring it. Indeed, it seems clear to me that too few people are acquiring it. The issue is that a lot of people manage to go to college and spend some time there without actually acquiring much in the way of improved communications skills. That, however, isn’t an indictment of “the humanities” it’s an indictment of ineffective teaching. Obviously, though, ineffective engineering or biology education isn’t going to be useful either.

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