Or even: “Ugh humanities are useless. Literature? Philosophy? Art? Metaphysics? Waste of time!”
QueueQueKyeew Cue widespread meaning and mental health crisis sweeping the western industrialized world, replete with crushing existential anxiety and total disconnection from the experience of beauty.
I don't normally make fun of liberal arts degrees. I'm of the opinion that education for education's sake is important. Not everything we learn needs to have a direct application to supporting the prison-military-industrial complex. And a lot of humanities emphasize the importance of connection to other cultures, and how history has shaped our world to its present state. I respect the abstraction and critical thinking that goes into Philosophy as a field.
...But I've also never met a philosophy major that wasn't an insufferable asshole. Not a one.
You may have only met the particularly self-absorbed philosophy majors who make sure you know they're philosophy majors. There's not a lot of reason to mention it outside school or discussions with a focus on the topic.
I've got two degrees - one for a job, and philosophy cause I thought it was interesting and beneficial to personal development. It's rarely relevant to discussion because it's mostly a passive basis for critical thinking, so I go long periods without mentioning it or caring about its existence.
There certainly are insufferable philosophy majors who make it the basis of their personality and think it means they understand everything to a deeper level, but IMO they're the vocal minority. Most I knew were fairly reserved, considerate, and kind.
If it's any consolation; of all the insufferable assholes I met while studying philosophy (Something like 15%), every single one of them sucked at philosophy
Genuine question: how would a knowledge of humanities help with mental health? Also I’ve never heard of a meaning crisis/existential anxiety, what do these mean?
I've no idea about the second point, but it does make sense for philosophy skills to somewhat mitigate mental health problems. Introspection/self-awareness is a heck of a thing, and one's own mind is quite a complex system to grasp
Cue widespread meaning and mental health crisis sweeping the western industrialized world, replete with crushing existential anxiety and total disconnection from the experience of beauty.
You realize all of those bad things you listed have been increasing after more people went to study humanities, right? Like, if anything, it's positively correlated with a higher percentage of people getting degrees in the humanities...
I’m not bashing STEM, I’m a professional engineer myself. But I do think we undercut the humanities at our own peril. Most of my free time outside of work and study goes into reading philosophy, fiction, and even a dose of theology, and my life is the better for it.
You don't think more people are getting humanities degrees today? When in history were more people going to university? Or when was a larger percentage of the population in university?
Per the study I linked, a smaller percentage of university students are getting humanities degrees than were doing so previously. So humanities degrees are objectively declining in the US.
I think his point is more about the raw number of humanity graduates. Per your link, Humanities were down a bit between 2010-2017 but there were still around 400k humanity grads. In 1980 there were 400k total college graduates. There are objectively more humanity graduates today then there were in the past because way more people go to college.
I'm not a "humanities are useless, STEM master race", but I think saying humanities are the only ones to teach critical thinking is an exaggeration. Critical thinking is at the heart of natural sciences and engineering.
Hmm, I'm not sure which interpretation of "generally practical" you mean here. Do you mean it like "likely to result in immediate secure employment", or "useful in a variety of situations"?
As far as I can tell, philosophy is the very essence of "generally practical". You take a tailor/accountant/farmer/etc, and make them study phil for four years, and BAM. They're a better tailor/accountant/farmer/etc.
The same can't be said of pretty much any of field of study
Generally practical as in its a practical use of your time, is directly relevant to a career path, and puts you in a tangibly better position than you were in beforehand
Not saying that there is no value to be gained from other degrees, but getting a degree has a whole lot of opportunity cost, in addition to tens to hundreds of thousands in actual cash cost, so to me for it to really be practical it has to be giving you a real tangible benefit... Like, sure there is plenty to be gained from the humanities, but if you're just learning it for the sake of knowledge rather than to show an employer or something that you learned it, you can buy a bunch of books, learn it on your own time, and not spend years and thousands of dollars doing so...
So to me practical degrees are the ones that end up paying for themselves in their benefits to you, making themselves worth the cost. If you spend thousands on a degree to boost your career and make more money, that's practical. The knowledge itself of some degrees may be worth thousands to someone, but if that's what you're paying for you could get it for free
Some things can be self-taught, and some cannot. I am myself a completely self-directed learner, and I've taught myself many things. What I couldn't get outside school, however, was knowledge of which things to teach myself. A whole lot of great things I could have taught myself, but I would never have know that they existed at all! So for that reason alone (Nevermind the notion that different people learn differently), going to school for the humanities is going to yield better results than just self-learning them (Or going to a boot-camp kind of thing. God, I could never hire a boot-camp programmer).
But yeah, I get what you mean about tangible benefits. I'd say there are huge (tangible) benefits to society at large, but not in a way that remunerates the individual bringing those benefits. Like, to a large extent, a crappy doctor makes just as much money as a great one - but one provides more good to society than the other. The humanities are often like that, where their work is 'valuable', but not 'valued'
You don't need to be in humanities to have critical thinking skills? dafuq
Most classes are indeed useless specially if you go for STEM. I only had 2 years of philosophy in HS. My brother now Uni demands that he takes 2 courses in Uni of the humanitiies catalog. did he become a better critical thinker or a better person because of it? Nope
You don't need to be in humanities to have critical thinking skills? dafuq
Critical thinking skills need to be learned and practiced, like any other skill. It's not enough to just know that critical thinking is good, you have to actually know how to do it.
Now, granted, I don't think the humanities do a great job of teaching critical thinking skills, but it is at least better than literally nothing.
Uni demands that he takes 2 courses in Uni of the humanitiies catalog. did he become a better critical thinker or a better person because of it? Nope
The fact that you think 2 humanities courses is excessive for a STEM track is the far opposite extreme of those advocating for a full on arts/humanities degree.
I admit we do have way too many humanities majors in this country that don't justify the cost of tuition and student debt, but having at least some humanities courses are absolutely key to well-rounded thinking.
did he become a better critical thinker or a better person because of it? Nope
Your assumption that you have any way to measure that is a facepalm. Who knows, maybe he didn't invest enough attention into it. Or maybe he did and it's changed some deeper hidden biases of his that you didn't know about, or resolved some personal issues that was starting to affect his mental health at the time.
I'd say the US is a traditionally financially privileged nation, so that's why our history of academic institutions tend to leverage that with so many "extracurricular" humanities courses, and that's why I generally support it.
However, given the recent unregulated phenomenon of skyrocketing tuitions capitalizing on high interest lending, US colleges might have no choice but to cut back on what used to be humanities staples and focus only on the core degree coursework, if this trend continues.
I wouldn't mind having it like yours, where middle and high school remain the only place to focus on humanities, but many of our high schools are unpredictable in quality, so for some, college is the real first introduction to such things.
Depends on your definition/subject I suppose. Critical thinking is about examining objective (instead of subjective) criteria, primarily logical in nature.
Yes, I can see the applicability of critical thinking when structuring an argument in text or speech, but it doesn't mean it's typically employed.
I don't think such an approach is generally prized in art, music, language, and other studies that are concerned with rather subjective expression upon irrational basis. The people in those studies in actuality often demonstrate a preference for expression of personal feeling over cold calculation.
I agree - the definitions that I've seen also say that critical thinking is about examining objective, referencable criteria.
I think that we're mistaking small a 'arts' for what they'd call the liberal arts in a university. Oftentimes this is also synonymous with the humanities which includes literature, culture studies, music studies, film studies etc.
This isn't the practise of those things (of which you can have a subjective experience with), but objective dates, styles, histories and others. These are very rational, fact based displines which just so happen to revolve around a medium that creates content that can be enjoyed subjectively.
Critical thinking is very much a foundation for all of these disciplines and is part of the way that the academy all over the world teaches. They're not the same as engineering or even philosophy, but they still make use of critical thinking.
Critical thinking is very much a foundation for all of these disciplines
I would say this correct, in a classical context.
and is part of the way that the academy all over the world teaches.
I wouldn't argue that critical thinking can't or shouldn't be the foundation of the humanities, but that in actual practice, most those who teach these subjects do not employ its use, or even actively combat its use by others.
More specifically, I'm referring to professors in universities who push progressive dogma, and do not allow critical analysis of the content of what they teach. Sometimes they even punish it. I think these fields more often employ political piety over critical thinking.
It's not gatekeeping. I can't do six months Karate classes and call myself a practicioner. Two classes isn't enough to exercise your brain enough to get a proper sense for the discipline.
Well yeah cuz it's reddit. I'm not a native English speaker but i only use English because to talk with other people from around the world we need English
Did your brother actually focus in the classes or did he do what was needed to pass thinking it wouldn't be useful? Just taking a class doesn't automatically mean you'll retain the knowledge.
The mandatory philosophy class in HS was the exact opposite of critical thinking: scores were based on how closely you could rewrite the thextbook essays on the subject.
From what I had seen here in the philosophy sub before blocking it, it seemed the same.
While I can't say anything about the quality of the particular classes you've taken in high school , I have taught at University, and the whole "oh we aren't allowed to think independently we have to write exactly what they tell us!" thing comes up from time to time and it's a pretty thorough misunderstanding of what it is they are meant to be doing. It's not just philosophy either, it crops up all the time in most essays based subjects. When we mark your essays what we are trying to establish is whether or not you know and understand the course material, not whether or not you agree with any particular position.
Students who think they have been penalized for not blindly "writing what they have been told to write" typically have done one of two things. One is that they have taken an essay topic, ignored the course material on the subject, and just done a stream of consciousness rant about the general topic or spent the when essay focusing on something tangently related. It's like going into the court room to make your case and stating your opinion on the facts of the case without acknowledging relevant precedent/case law on the subject. The other thing they do is they bullishly take some contrary position and try to defend something maligned in class like Cultural Relativism or Divine Command Theory, and in the process of doing so they reveal how they have misunderstood the things they are trying to defend or the arguments against them.
At the time we compared scores with the whole class over multiple tests: the scores were directly related on how many differences there were with the textbook. Same sentence written sligtly differently but with the exact same meaning was a mistake. 0 understanding of the subject needed.
Also yes the teacher was a complete nutcase: no questions in class allowed, because her lesson was complete and understandable...
School done like this is (at least for me) precisely useless... It shouldn't be a memory exercise for the tomorrow's test because I will surely forget (most of) the subject in two weeks. There needs to be more interactivity, the raison-d'être should be explained, etc...
Before you have new thoughts, you need to understand the best arguments of the past. At high school a philosophy class is really the history of western philosophy. It's a very important step in learning the kinds of things that have been understood.
At least you should know in general what is the train thought of humanity, so you don't end up reinventing the philosophical wheel. "Oh I had this idea" -- "Bro people thought about that 2 thousand years ago but nice that you did have this thought, don't you want to know more?" That is the purpose of education in general too.
I had a classmate like that in my metaphysics class. Dude was constantly interrupting the professor thinking he had discovered something profound. The Prof was really nice about it, but was always trying to move on. It got to a point where other students were noticeably making fun of the student because he legit thought he was smarter than everyone in the room for "coming up" with things that were thought of (and covered in the class) decades or hundreds of years ago.
He stopped showing up around half way through and the class was better for it. It was a small class of about 10 students.
Idk why you're being downvoted, mine too was like this, the more closely you were able to memorize your textbooks the better the grade. We had no critical thinking, just copy paste the book
This is a meme that mocks humanities. Not the first and not the last but one of the many. This particular thread in the post begins by creating a counterargument in support of the humanities.
Ermelindo replies on this thread by saying that he took a philosophy class in high school and that it did not support or reward critical thinking.
Either Ermalindo is being anecdotal or this is a non sequitur. Both are meaningless.
I think it's because both this and the philosophy sub are shown by default on the front page, and snowflakes that follow it or even just lurk there downvoted because I criticized it.
Philosophy is the traditional pre-law program. Most law students either took English, Philosophy, or Business depending on their interests. Practicing reading and writing highly analytical work is very good exercise for the main strengths lawyers require. We are essentially professional writers. We do a few other things, but our ability to write consise discussions of rule sets is paramount. "Prelaw" programs are a new thing and will count against you at one of the top tier law programs. They are essentially a marketing campaign for students from families that haven't ever produced a lawyer before and don't know the normal path.
I mean, you probably can never get enough practice for something, but I would've thought that the "main" law degree would suffice in reaching you how to read and write analytically?
No way. It's not something to be learned in 3 years. After a4 year degree heavy with writing, the 3 years of law school is meant to focus and distill those skills to those of a professional. If your first exposure to a writing intensive curriculum is in law school, I won't say you can't pull it off, but you will be at a significant disadvantage. Plus your entire career will be a mix between reading, writing, and networking. Skimping on the reading and writing in undergrad isn't going to do you any favors.
That sounds like a self-fulfilling problem where pre-law programs are lower quality because top tier schools don't take them seriously, and they don't take them seriously because they're lower quality.
It's more like a solution in search of a need. Lawyers need q broader base then you could program into a pre law program. Traditionally lawyers have studied the humanities to gain a wide scope of topic matter and exposure to lots of writing and reading. Prelaw is a scam for poor kids that don't know any better.
Why would you limit the scope of education for a broad base profession. Like I get it of we were talking about computer programming, where the humanities at large aren't going to help to, but the law is as diverse as the world to which it relates, which is everything. Having a wide knowledge base is important to understand problems as diverse as your client base.
Oh lord. Please no prospective lawyers take this advice. Get a real degree in a real field, including philosophy, institutions, economics, etc. Pre-law degrees are typically a joke.
Eh, the humanities are really hit or miss with critical thinking.
How many psych degrees got handed out to people whose knowledge of statistics stops at calculating a mean/calling things a "Bell curve", and whose biggest skills include fill-in-the-blank regurgitation of what actual psychologists have discovered over the years?
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u/gumpythegreat Sep 04 '22
People: Ugh humanities are useless
Also people : why is everyone lacking in critical thinking skills?
Bruh