Agreed. Civilized societies should provide free educations to all. Contrary to MAGA's primitive opinion, educated citizens are a culture's greatest asset.
There's a real monkey's paw angle when this is seen as a counterpoint to all the years we spent anointing as the inevitable rulers of society a bunch of ninnies who had studied Latin declensions but weren't convinced the Earth went round the Sun.
(the consistent theme of course is that in both cases the people in question weren't well rounded or broadly socialized, were massively entitled, and were mostly dudes)
there should be a well rounded solution, but we’ve managed to over-correct so hard, we wring the ability to reference history and consider responsibility out of a couple of generations of otherwise capable and industrious men, which sucks for our specific brand of chauvinistic capitalism
There’s no serious reason to think that powerful men with humanities educations are more restrained or virtuous. See Peter Thiel, Donald Rumsfeld, however many Oxbridge imperial functionaries, etc.
The humanities are great, and taking them seriously would result in better analysis than this.
Sure, I was playing fast and loose, but it's a tired, vague argument. Which dangers? Which humanities classes taken by whom exactly would have prevented them?
It’s not an argument. You’re not owed my time or focus. want to know what I and others think about what I posted last night? it’s in hundreds of quotes, replies, and clarifications
You got snarky without knowing wtf you were talking about, continue to be condescending, and now I have to fix it? No
BS. Try teaching thermodynamics to a humanities major and you’ll understand why just stuffing humanities courses into a STEM schedule is lazy and useless.
Intro courses are already taken in high school: history, geography, English lit, civics, etc. Force feeding them in college is unnecessary. Let students take what they are actually passionate to learn.
Try teaching thermodynamics through the Art that was inspired by it. Art and Science being divorced from each other is dumb. For the entire history of Man, technical advances and Art have been inspiring each other
Thats the way it’s done now, which I agree is lazy and useless. It’s also a product of a very long campaign to excise humanities and art from the education of future tech and industry workers/leaders.
You assume that if you force feed people humanities courses that they will somehow “get it”. You don’t need course credit to read literature or appreciate art. Nor can you force people to appreciate literature, history, art, etc by forcing them to take courses
You don't need credit to do a lot of "STEM" things either, but that's not the point. I took 1 art class and it helped me appreciate every museum I visited for the rest of my life even though I'm not an art person. And people who appreciate art don't destroy priceless relics in the name of efficiency
you are correct, though ‘read’ and ‘appreciate’ are barely 100-level educational outcomes. humanities courses teach critical thinking, content analysis, spotting disinformation, engaging in logical discussion, etc. reducing the humanities to reading is like reducing science to just pushing buttons.
Man if only there were a branch of human inquiry that wasn’t grounded in induction and quantification that could teach reading comprehension and argumentative reasoning.
As a biologist that worked at a CRO who watched engineers get tasked to build inhalation chambers to gas dogs with test articles, "Oh we don't have to work with the animals, we just flip the switch" is absolutely fucking real. People do not understand the shit places like Battelle do
It’s worse than that. For a lot of people in STEM, they were taught humanities *badly*, such that they are no longer neutral towards them, but instead remember those classes as an obnoxious waste of time.
I know someone that got a master's in bioethics that works at Nationwide Children's Hospital that quite literally asserts that Peter Singer is fucking evil. People do not understand how bad this is
Counterpoint: the leaders of the Nazi Party were mostly wannabe artists-- Hitler, bad painter; Goebbels, bad novelist; the head of the Hitler Youth, bad poet, and so on. None had significant STEM training. Nazi "race science" was couched in philosophical jargon, not quantitative science.
You described a lack of humanities education as dangerous. If anything, more “danger” comes from the morally vacuous debate-me culture of modern humanities education than from pure STEM.
I described the danger of teaching men STEM by excising humanities from their curriculum. I didn’t say a thing about the pros and cons of a humanities education. There’s lots of dangers that come from lots of places. They’re not mutually exclusive and this isn’t a tier ranking post
Amplifybio was very loud about maximizing productivity and cutting labor to the absolute bare minimum. Finding out the minimum amount of labor necessary to keep a lab floor running. Disgusting practices
Yes, overall educ, but no to the opinion that these men understand any STEM concepts from school. We need more funding and much better real world educ- humanities and STEM in our country. More and better educ!
It is really depressing to see the lack of reading comprehension and the badly conceived arguments demonstrated by STEM people in the responses to this very thread 🙃
In all fairness, it’s only SOME stem people. The ones that keep getting mad because they think I’m saying ALL stem ppl are bad. Also I’m pretty sure they’re all men but I don’t wanna pay myself on the back too hard
Since this has been resurfaced, I just want to point out that replying with “well this person with a humanities degree sucks” has close to nothing at all to do with what the post was about. It does not state that engineers are immoral, so go get mad at your former reading comprehension professor
I always thought not having humanities courses in MBA programs was the biggest threat. STEM bros have always been a problem, we just started giving them money for the last 20 years. The sociopaths in management have been causing havoc since the 80’s
I could have completed my physics BS without taking a single course on ethics, which is extremely fucked up. I chose it as one of my electives, but it would have been easy not to!
Agreed. More than ever we need ethics to be taught. Not only as a singular subject, but as a core part of the curriculum across multiple different subjects. How STEM impacts the world, short and long term, people, and the current barriers within STEM should be ingrained in every student.
I think those guys were going to turn out as little fascists anyway. As thoroughly flawed as modern ed is there was def space to take humanities if you weren't a mini fascist weirdo, these guys just didn't do it or more often did do it with a lack of self awareness previously thought impossible.
Right exactly. I’m saying that this should be mitigated by educating all STEM students on how their fields and the humanities are inextricable is all. It’s the same way business schools should teach ethics within their other courses not as an add on
I agree with many of your points, there’s also another one; work on fixing the embedded need of men to be superior over women and anything women-coded. Humanities, emotions, empathy are female coded. Women in tech companies who try to warn about the human side, ignored. It’s all supremacy BS.
It's wild how much it correlated with money too. Any of the fields you can make money in are these hyper masculine bro wastelands, and then you get to like ecology (or mycology) and it's the complete opposite. The dept of biology I did my PhD in was maybe 1/3 male. Maybe even less actually.
Every experience I've ever had with a business program gave me the impression it was so thoroughly captured by it's industry that this would be a bit like mandating global cultural education at Raytheon. The horse is largely out of the barn.
Yeah I mean we have two generations of tech industry workers who largely don’t understand or care about the long term good or harm their products cause, and it’s pretty much because of the two situations we’ve described. The industry controls the curriculum in higher and more and more in lower ed
My PhD is in mushrooms so I'm from a strange and unrepresentative corner of STEM but like the kids I knew who went into petro chemistry had fully internalized the meaning of that already by their first homecoming and they absolutely did not give a shit. The dollar was king. Not for lack of awareness
Like I don't think an education exists where guys like this don't manage to show up. It's the world outside of Ed, the relentless self-reinforcement of our venture capitalist bro ecosystem that selects for and amplifies these weirdos. Even the most ideal education couldn't overcome that
I don't think education can address these kinds of issues within the class system without the revolutionary change. The feedback loop is just too strong outside the university walls ya know?
Comments
Arts and how to do your taxes should be two required degrees for everyone in the USA
The humanities are great, and taking them seriously would result in better analysis than this.
You got snarky without knowing wtf you were talking about, continue to be condescending, and now I have to fix it? No
They think coding is God and fascism is country.
Engineers need to take thermo, doctors need to take chemistry.
“Even though they don’t like it or maybe don’t want to.”
“Because?”
“Because it’s morally wrong, ethically repugnant, and potentially disastrous to allow them to become a doctor or engineer without it.”
Arts and humanities should be part of the interconnected educational plan as the rest, not crammed in alongside.
https://bsky.app/profile/kurtishanlon.bsky.social/post/3knei6eyvx32h
I’m an accomplished software engineer and, at 40, I value my liberal arts education more every day
Humanities is not the missing piece.
The part that was missing - that is missing for nearly all of us - is ecology.
We are completely disconnected from the living world - our life support system.
We are ecologically illiterate.
Star Trek isn't just cool ships 201.
How we Got here and where we're going. 301.
Can We versus Should We 401.
I'm not sure any corner of higher Ed can be said not to be completely captured by it's respective industry. Unis are run as businesses, money talks