Why teach the humanities?

Last Wednesday at the New Westminster's philosopher's cafe, the discussion was about the teaching of the humanities in today's universities.

Many lament that universities are becoming more and more like training centers for business, engineering, medicine, pharmacy, and commerce graduates and giving less and less emphasis on the humanities.  That there is too much specialization and not enough training on the general way of how to think that humanities such as philosophy, history, and other humanities teaches.

After all, democracy depends on an intelligent and independent thinking electorate to make good choices in their leaders and progressive thinking to change with the times.

Shula said that the humanities encourage independent thinking, and even subversion against the status quo where change is desirable.  With logical thinkers, revolutions should be logical ones, not emotional ones.

There was discussion that the fast developing economies like China tends to emphasize technical graduates which fulfills the needs of developing technology for a growing economy.  However, this is at the cost of ignoring the bigger picture of social change and the flexible thinking that is required to handle this social sea change.

Mano not only supports the importance of the humanities but also think that the traditional university model of teaching the humanities may be becoming somewhat dated and that there should be other avenues such as web based discussions that make the humanities more available without the dedicated cost and time required of the traditional undergraduate BA program.

More education, whether the humanities or technical education is always a good thing.  I think the humanities suffers from being general.  Most high school graduates and their parents, when faced with a choice of undergraduate studies and the time and cost required, will find it difficult to choose a general course of studies that do not lead to definitely better choice of careers versus career possibilities from a professional degree.

The humanities also suffers from being general in that it is abused by students who only want to pass and do the minimum required. While the dedicated can indeed get a lot out of a BA, others can breeze through it compared to the technical degrees.  Employers no longer see a BA as and indication of an independent thinker and the value of a BA for starting a career is much diminished than decades ago.

To me, the university undergraduate program is the transition from the information gathering stage at high school to the independent research in graduate school.  It is the stage when black and white is filled with shades of grey, and not every situation has a definite "right" answer.  Self learning gradually replaces force fed information.

While it is true that the humanities focuses on the bigger broader issues, the technical and business schools also encourage independent thinking.  It is the mechanical engineer that creates the car that the mechanic services and the electrical engineer that dreams up the new circuit for the latest gadget.  The business graduate that is encourage to apply business principles to all kinds of different business.

It is true that technical graduate can benefit from more humanities training than their current minimum of one per semester. It will further lift their minds from the narrow focus at hand to look more at philosophy, political systems, and history.

The same can be said about the humanities student.  They should take compulsory courses in science and mathematics so that they have the basic knowledge to make decent judgment about technology like nuclear power, analytical tools like statistics, and life sciences like biology to be a more rounded knowledgeable person.

Here, we have some hard choices to make - should we have doctors and engineers take more humanities which means that they have to drop some of their other technical courses in their already heavy academic schedule?  Would we rather have a more socially minded but less medically trained doctor looking after our health?

Or should we lengthen the already long medical, engineering and other professional training by another year to incorporate the humanities and further increase the cost of training our professionals and thereby increase the cost of their services?

Compare this with making basic science and mathematics compulsory training for humanities students that end up being our politicians and social leaders,  I think making basic science and math mandatory for BA graduates is long overdue.