The Piedmont Highlander

The Student News Site of Piedmont High School

The Piedmont Highlander

The Piedmont Highlander

Return to the dusty clutches of the humanities

Return+to+the+dusty+clutches+of+the+humanities

Once upon a time, higher education consisted almost purely of the humanities. That is where the whole idea of a liberal arts education comes from. But as the modern world developed, the sciences became more and more important.

Even more recently, academia and the rest of the world have placed greater emphasis on engineering and technology. Since 1970, the percentage of humanities majors across the nation has fallen by half, to a measly seven percent, according to federal data.

Part of this is just the balancing of the academic scales. But the other part, the more insidious part, pervades society with the idea that the humanities are useless and antiquated.

Students who excel in humanities are less acclaimed than science-related competition winners, and departments suffer similarly, with breakthrough scientific discoveries and technological innovations deemed much more exciting than the latest take on Shakespeare. Funding for “practical fields” is high, and Silicon Valley and Wall Street beckon with high-paying jobs.Screen Shot 2015-12-09 at 2.18.59 PM

At PHS, this bias is clear. The English department has one AP class and one honors course, but the science department boasts twice those numbers.

While the history department offers two AP classes, many students do not take any history at all freshman and senior year.

Most of the innovation at PHS is concentrated around STEM fields, with the young computers department to gain AP Computer Principles next year.

More colloquially, being a STEM nerd has overtaken your average English or history buff in coolness. Students who would rather swallow sawdust than talk about the Renaissance are fleeing the dusty clutches of the humanities.

This is an ideological clash: STEM fields wield empirical data about employment and starting salaries against protesting essays from the humanities.

But the thought behind this crime against humanities is flawed: merely 27 percent of college graduates with bachelor degrees have jobs directly related to their majors, according to a study from the Federal Reserve in 2013.

Additionally, a year after graduation, 84 percent of humanities majors are satisfied with their choice of study, according to the 2013 Humanities Report Card from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In fact, three out of four employers want hires that benefit from the most important aspects of the humanities: critical thinking, complex problem-solving, and communication, according to a report from the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Caught up in cold, hard statistics and technological improvements, the focus on STEM fields misses a core value of education.

Deep, creative, critical thought is essential for the development of a well-trained brain. The humanities, as the name implies, speak to the questions and emotions of human nature.

And they are vitally important: law and politics create educated citizens vital to our democracy, history teaches the lessons of the past when we are overly focused on the future, ethics dictate our structured and rational society, language becomes more essential amid increasing globalism, culture and the arts are the zest of human life, and philosophy answers the deepest questions of human existence.

The perception that the study of the humanities is old-fashioned ignores the importance of digital tools and how important modern topics, like sexism and racism, are debated and studied within the humanities.

If STEM fields help society advance economically and in other ways in relation to technology, then the humanities are crucial to cultural and social progress.

STEM fields and the humanities are intertwined and dependent on each other for the advancement of education.

While career paths may be less obvious or traditional, the humanities should not be forsaken. At the very least, do not bemoan those English classes you are required to take — relish them.

In college, with those general education requirements or that core curriculum, remember that the humanities classes are an integral part of your broader education. In fact, they are an integral part of life.

Nobody is going to read the paper you wrote about your cure for cancer if you write like a twelve-year-old.

You cannot complain about politics if you cannot understand history, law or politics itself. Your soul will wither and die if you never read a book or see a play after you finish your education. Wither. And die. Here, let me wipe your tears with a 3D-printed tissue.

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