It’s a debt slavery con game put over on children. 4 years of Clubbing - college is clubbing- in exchange for losing the most productive years of your life and going into debt slavery to pay for it.
Tear down Harvard and use their endowment to build several thousand votech and community colleges. A legion of plumbers, carpenters, machinists, HVAC techs, and electricians would do the US more good than the useless eaters occupying the seats of Current Year's "higher learning."
We are likely near peak on STEM employment. Despite it being this massive push by universities, government, and private marketing orgs, STEM only occupies about 10-15% of total jobs, at best. Pushing more and more people into STEM pipelines if they are already saturated is not healthy for the economy.
Functioning universities used to work closely with industry and research firms to build pipelines of students, allowing for admissions to programs to match the wax and wane of STEM needs with variable class sizes. Now, universities just turn the taps wide open and pack the classrooms. You will naturally get more mathematicians and biologists going into the barista trade with that level of greed and stupidity.
I doubt it. If you do the work and do well in STEM a huge part of that is creativity and finding new ways to solve problems, even if in practice most people aren’t that creative. I feel like if everyone did STEM probably all the unskilled jobs (like baristas but not like plumbers) would probably be done by robots already. But we still need plumbers so I’m not trying to discourage anyone from being a plumber. Just saying I don’t think STEM is so dire. There’s no cap on the amount of STEM work that can be done as long as you’re innovative enough and maybe willing to break a few rules, on the other hand the max amount of plumbers we can have correlates to the amount of plumbing, I don’t think we can have more plumbers than that. So maybe being a plumber is secretly more elite too anyway since the number of plumbers is limited by demand but STEM can create new demand for itself if you’re smart and creative enough.
Great books in the humanities, like The Odyssey or The Divine Comedy, are essential to civilization and show readers something about what it means to be a human being. But you don't need to "go to college" for that, or pay tuition. Check out the Catherine Project:
I was in the humanities for years, hahaha and have no talent for STEM or any science or math, though in my case I regret going through the humanities to a large extent.
I mean, yeah, as the comments have pointed out, there are other alternatives besides science and math! Just I hear enough “don’t go to college, go to trade school and become a plumber or welder!” on social media that I feel like we’ve all heard that opinion. And yeah you can also become a professional author, business owner, and many other things as well without going to college for it.
Very true, speaking as someone who is an author hereon Substack (I publish philosophy essays and serial-novels of a fantasy variety along with a few epic poems), you don't need formal education for that stuff. You just need to love reading.
Though, my humanities courses mean that I'm now in a position to go abroad to teach English in Japan, and with a bit of training and maybe a French BA in Grammar (another un-practical ba) I could earn more than any plumber out there teaching French in a university. A proposal suggested by some Japanese friends, that I'm considering.
Thing is we each have our own path, I have friends who have gone back to school to become plumbers and welders. I respect those who stick to their own paths, or who go to trade-school, though I am weary of the artsie-fartsie left-wing folk giving us artists and writers a bad name. But then again, I'm traditional and utterly tired of modernity and her champions.
I have a BA in History and Political Science, and I'll admit it--I wanted to have fun, not to work. The problem was that in order to get a more advanced degree I had to swear loyalty to postmodernism, which I could not bring myself to do.
I’m of two minds about this broadside against the humanities, since I am (1) a Boomer, having been born in 1949, (2) a retired soldier with nine years of active duty and nineteen as a drilling reservist, and (3) the recipient of a master’s degree in history.
I received that degree in 1984, when it was still possible to teach and learn history, as opposed to shoveling out and imbibing postmodern claptrap. Indeed, it was my sense that things were trending in that direction that led me to pass on a doctorate and pursue other interests. But in one way and another, the education I received as a history major and graduate student has been of value to me.
But you’re right: As it is nowadays, the very worst educational path one can pursue is in the humanities and the social sciences. I emerged from college as a reasonably well-educated person. Today, I’d emerge as a credulous and ignorant Hamas hugger. There is no more education in that sector of the academy; there is only indoctrination. But those on the STEM side of things ought not to be complacent. The comrades are coming for them, too.
Gee whiz my medieval history degree has been a huge boost to my success (sarc) in my slight defense it was a quality education in the late 80's and I wanted to teach. But the tree is fully rotted now
I’m often keen to tout my own lack of formal education - possibly as a tacit appeal to the idea that I’m a total autodidact - though in reality, I do have two years of community college-level Humanities under my belt, after which I had meant to transition to university until the plan was derailed by some serious circumstances I won’t get into here.
I can say with some certainty (and perhaps vanity) that I had learned most of the ropes about dealing with bigger ideas - sciences, cultural, and otherwise - *before* going to college (at 27), and I sure as hell picked up zero of my writing prowess there.
I remember some of my Profs quite fondly. With the exception of one Prof who fit the archetype of the self-flagellating alpha male who never tired of his hifalutin ideas for a perfect society that I always butted heads with, I found that the Humanities department at my school was patient and compassionate. At the time, I was flirting with Libertarianism and Climate Skepticism, and they were pretty good about it, though unopposed. I have since abandoned both ideas.
Anyway, there was a heap of idealism in the Humanities that had always made me uncomfortable, and I had always gotten the impression it was unsustainable. Sure enough, wait a few years, and anything not founded on anything falsifiable is prone to corruption leading to splinter sects, like religions.
There was a time I would have recommended the Humanities for those who wanted a plurality of ideas with which to expand their minds rather than to major in one narrow field of specialty, but no longer. I don’t even feel like it’s too reliable for that (although, in fairness, all I hear about the school system is the most controversial stuff, and I haven’t been intimately familiar with schooling in years otherwise, so I caution to not take my word as cardinal).
You hit on a good point that resonated with me: classifying the STEM fields as a social science. I feel that as well about basically every discipline in which collaboration and cooperation is necessary. Not all social contracts will be lain out under the rubric of the Humanities. Ironically, I don’t consider them social sciences because I don’t consider them sciences. Disciplines, yes. But they lack the falsifiability and replicability of the scientific method.
Ultimately, I would discourage schooling for those who don’t have a clear vision for a career or life path. If you have a talent and a knack for learning the ropes the hard way, you can still get by on your own accord, even if you don’t have credentials. It just takes some cunning and persistence.
Oh, I mean classifying some social sciences as fields of STEM if they have enough rigor. Social sciences are like psychology, linguistics, etc. Sociology is probably useless though when there’s social psychology and since sociology gives us all the “studies” nonsense.
So Michaela woke up and chose verbal violence today... 😂
This was a fun piece. While every generation has its strong individuals who defy the stereotypes, you're not wrong about Boomer 'culture'... and it certainly got us rolling down the 'humanities' pathway 🤦🏻
As to your future posts? I'll do my best to keep up, but my simpleton's mind oft gets lost in the arithmetics.
It’s when someone has a conversation with me and assumes they’re dumb as I never went to university.
They’ll tell to me and then drop in that they have a degree, as it that means anything to me, but not state what it’s a degree in. Usually social studies 😂😂. What a worthless degree to be in debt for. No wonder they’re dying for Biden to forgive all their debts.
Is it not a shame that the humanities are corrupted and infected with grim rationalists addicted to deconstruction and laze? The search for meaning and answering questions about ought instead of is can be of immense usage.
The issue that the humanities have is that there is no mechanism for accordance and esteem anymore. While there is much to criticize about our modern-data driven research, we can understand that there is a pathway to reach agreement among peers and general society through this mechanism. When you question the mechanism, you question the entire field, but assuming the mechanism, the entire field shines true.
There is not a mechanism in modern English, history, or art departments to separate the wheat from the chaff, which means that esteem is won not by work, but by convincing people you have esteem, which is innately activist.
(Note: it is my guess that the ancient polymath gathered credibility from non-humanities, which gave their tastes an edge in them. The rigor of humanities is participation in non-humanities.)
This has basically been my impression. I'm also still a fan of the arts, but not sure why people can't just go to art school for that, or tutoring, or even self-teach. Lots of the best artists are, and not remotely only ones that have a "naïve" style. You basically need to know enough math to do perspective, enough biology for anatomy and botany, enough physics for optics... Similar things can be said about music, poetry, etc.
I still appreciate "humanities" in the sense of arts, talking politics, etc. hence "college humanities" being my complaint, though I don't think talking politics is generally called "having a humanities discussion" when you're with your relatives for the holidays and a fight breaks out with your relatives who you know disagree and think you're going to Hell too and whatever.
The cocktail party talk classes! The sciences are more fun but numbers and metrics are absolutely fickle based on the human too and machine. I felt like I had to take the but I like the social sciences even though they are less likely to do replacative work to where it becomes scientific law like Newtons Laws. There won't, I don't think, ever be alot of scientific law in the social sciences due to the ever changing human and societal organism and how variables cause all kinds of changes in human behavior because our emotions and senses are manipulated all the time. I will say the ancient polymaths studied everything and math was there. I also think that data driven decisions now should be questioned because metrics are always manipulated.
Social sciences are probably just harder. Humans are more complicated than rocks or stars, unless you bring in the fringe hypothesis about rocks and stars that lead to things like crystal healing, astrology, and conscious universe types of hypotheses (which aren't all the same, one could be true and not others, but similar enough) and then you're back to square 1 because you're talking about people and the effects of things on people. I basically agree with this (an idea people often don't even consider because of all the propaganda, admittedly mostly from humanities majors yet again, that all the so-called Romantics hated science:)
"When categorizing the many disciplines of science that developed during this period, Romantics believed that explanations of various phenomena should be based upon vera causa, which meant that already known causes would produce similar effects elsewhere.[2]: 15 It was also in this way that Romanticism was very anti-reductionist: they did not believe that inorganic sciences were at the top of the hierarchy but at the bottom, with life sciences next and psychology placed even higher.[2]: 19 This hierarchy reflected Romantic ideals of science because the whole organism takes more precedence over inorganic matter, and the intricacies of the human mind take even more precedence since the human intellect was sacred and necessary to understanding nature around it and reuniting with it."
Popper, Feyerabend, etc. also supported Romantic science, not positivism, much to the dismay of all the people who've heard things about Popper and think he's on their side and quote him (which Holly MathNerd will be writing about in an entirely different context, the paradox of tolerance, soon, so maybe I should cover Romantic science while she's doing that.)
I’m okay with getting rid of Humanities degrees, but not the subjects. A Classical education is an excellent pre-professional course choice. The humanities are the basis of human thought and creativity. The early scientists and mathies were immersed in history and philosophy and theology. They knew better than to think human nature is basically good. It doesn’t take a concentration in history to grasp that there’s nothing new under the sun. Would you become a mathematician by ignoring Euclid because he’s not modern? STEM is less than STEAM. I believe the problem is premature specialization. A solid liberal arts education can be completed in secondary school. But currently there’s no space or time for it because students have to complete college-level classes instead.
There are plenty of vocational and two-year degree schools.
Pushing college learning into secondary schools has brought about the death of liberal arts, to the detriment of STEM occupations. I am referring to the dearth of ethics and integrity present in today’s corporate culture.
NB: None of this is meant to justify the usurpation of humanities departments by progressive academicians to further their own political agenda.
Probably. That ties into all my ranting about corporations as well. I don't really see the use of humanities degrees except to teach more humanities, so maybe they're not entirely useless, but even then, if everyone learned this stuff like you said, would we really need them? I don't want people to just have a completely utilitarian tech education, but I still question all the things that are taught in humanities courses that often just feel like pure entertainment. Maybe we should be reading Euclid's Elements and Lucretius (even if he wasn't very accurate about lots of things) and things like that in humanities classes. And let's read lots of German naturalists.
Even if we keep humanities courses around, the emphases seem to be all in the wrong places. I wouldn't make it all super STEM centric but I don't know why we can't be reading way more basically sci-fi and fantasy in humanities classes, even though I'm just calling classics sci-fi and fantasy in this case. Probably humanities classes are largely run by huge conformists who don't like things they can't understand, and think books with robots and dragons in them are just weird. We probably don't need to spend so much time on humanities as STEM anyway but we could increase the quality a lot while decreasing the quantity. Like let's just have people read the good books and maybe write fewer reports or something. The idea anyone should focus mostly on humanities feels like a distraction, but yeah, I wouldn't want people never reading books again. I've had to get myself to be like "it's OK, novels aren't a waste of time due to being 'fake,' history books won't send you back to the past" just to get myself to read things that aren't academic again. All the good scientists and mathematicians and even inventors and engineers like what you referred to as the subjects though.
While I sense there is some overlap in our viewpoints, articles like this one are why I have not become a subscriber. I have two assertions to make counter to this screed: the first is that studying the Humanities is vital to becoming a full participant in a democracy. The second is that Humanities departments, as such, were systematically eviscerated in the 1990s, as I witnessed firsthand as a student a major midwestern land-grant university. (I was able to take a Humanities class from one of the last great professors in the topic, where we read and discussed Voltaire, Pope, Goethe, et. al. The University was at the tail end of phasing the department out, which by the time I got to University consisted of only two, very elderly professors). Point being, the dragon you think you’re tilting at was slain long ago.
Humanities has been supplanted by various “Studies” (Womens Studies, Cultural Studies, etc.). Which I think is maybe what you’re thinking of here?
The Humanities have been a horrible mistake that cost us endless wars and suffering since Socrates and Plato. Magic Kingdoms of the mind that have been nightmares since the Thirty Tyrants of Athens, who killed per capita numbers equal to Stalin or Mao.
Well, when you're bored and have nothing to think about except a cup of cappuccino, you might remember that the Humanities help to make us functioning human beings.
No, they take what is decent in us and leverage these decent impulses...and the gullible trust of youth ....and leverage same for money, rice bowls, power.
No, they are at best 2500 years old if we start with Socrates.
But the problem you see are Humanities professors from Socrates to now playing General and sending out their military age male students and female camp followers (yes you are, ladies) to raise Hell.
That’s the biggest problem.
There’s others, like overproduction of elites (or told they’re elites) with no skills but mischief and arbitrage, arbitrage a gentle term for grift.
Then we get to whom we’re leaving the kids with, this is an increasing curve of madness.
Finally and not least in America and it’s Empire at home and abroad the school is the real local government, control and taxation authority, any people’s Revolution would and usually does recognize this instantly and proceeds accordingly. The local police and National Intelligence agencies are a trifle compared to the schools.
"Liberal arts instruction produces liberals. Done right, this can mean classical liberals, which is rather nice. Classical liberalism can be delightful if buffered with enough Christianity and common sense. Liberal arts done poorly produces a different sort of liberal: the kind that loves government programs but still believes in freedom of expression and a few other freedoms. Liberal arts done really badly produces Marxists, Wall St. Occupiers, woketards, and truculent baristas with massive student loan debt."
It’s a debt slavery con game put over on children. 4 years of Clubbing - college is clubbing- in exchange for losing the most productive years of your life and going into debt slavery to pay for it.
Tear down Harvard and use their endowment to build several thousand votech and community colleges. A legion of plumbers, carpenters, machinists, HVAC techs, and electricians would do the US more good than the useless eaters occupying the seats of Current Year's "higher learning."
Oh, did you know Philip Glass also worked as a plumber specifically?
That explains why his music sounds so hollow and tinny. 🙃
Yes. I’d still prefer more STEM jobs but plumbers > gender studies, at least we actually need plumbers.
Plumbers are helpful. Gender studies is just made up shit.
We are likely near peak on STEM employment. Despite it being this massive push by universities, government, and private marketing orgs, STEM only occupies about 10-15% of total jobs, at best. Pushing more and more people into STEM pipelines if they are already saturated is not healthy for the economy.
https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20212/u-s-stem-workforce-definition-size-and-growth
Functioning universities used to work closely with industry and research firms to build pipelines of students, allowing for admissions to programs to match the wax and wane of STEM needs with variable class sizes. Now, universities just turn the taps wide open and pack the classrooms. You will naturally get more mathematicians and biologists going into the barista trade with that level of greed and stupidity.
I doubt it. If you do the work and do well in STEM a huge part of that is creativity and finding new ways to solve problems, even if in practice most people aren’t that creative. I feel like if everyone did STEM probably all the unskilled jobs (like baristas but not like plumbers) would probably be done by robots already. But we still need plumbers so I’m not trying to discourage anyone from being a plumber. Just saying I don’t think STEM is so dire. There’s no cap on the amount of STEM work that can be done as long as you’re innovative enough and maybe willing to break a few rules, on the other hand the max amount of plumbers we can have correlates to the amount of plumbing, I don’t think we can have more plumbers than that. So maybe being a plumber is secretly more elite too anyway since the number of plumbers is limited by demand but STEM can create new demand for itself if you’re smart and creative enough.
Great books in the humanities, like The Odyssey or The Divine Comedy, are essential to civilization and show readers something about what it means to be a human being. But you don't need to "go to college" for that, or pay tuition. Check out the Catherine Project:
https://catherineproject.org/
I’ve never heard of the Catherine Project, but this is basically what I think! I read the Divine Comedy at home, you don’t need to read it at college!
Still, it was pretty nice to take a poetry class taught by Anthony Hecht, and to read the Victorians with Prof. George H. Ford.
Some professors are worth listening to. Or used to be.
I was in the humanities for years, hahaha and have no talent for STEM or any science or math, though in my case I regret going through the humanities to a large extent.
I mean, yeah, as the comments have pointed out, there are other alternatives besides science and math! Just I hear enough “don’t go to college, go to trade school and become a plumber or welder!” on social media that I feel like we’ve all heard that opinion. And yeah you can also become a professional author, business owner, and many other things as well without going to college for it.
Very true, speaking as someone who is an author hereon Substack (I publish philosophy essays and serial-novels of a fantasy variety along with a few epic poems), you don't need formal education for that stuff. You just need to love reading.
Though, my humanities courses mean that I'm now in a position to go abroad to teach English in Japan, and with a bit of training and maybe a French BA in Grammar (another un-practical ba) I could earn more than any plumber out there teaching French in a university. A proposal suggested by some Japanese friends, that I'm considering.
Thing is we each have our own path, I have friends who have gone back to school to become plumbers and welders. I respect those who stick to their own paths, or who go to trade-school, though I am weary of the artsie-fartsie left-wing folk giving us artists and writers a bad name. But then again, I'm traditional and utterly tired of modernity and her champions.
I have a BA in History and Political Science, and I'll admit it--I wanted to have fun, not to work. The problem was that in order to get a more advanced degree I had to swear loyalty to postmodernism, which I could not bring myself to do.
I've been working ever since.
I’m of two minds about this broadside against the humanities, since I am (1) a Boomer, having been born in 1949, (2) a retired soldier with nine years of active duty and nineteen as a drilling reservist, and (3) the recipient of a master’s degree in history.
I received that degree in 1984, when it was still possible to teach and learn history, as opposed to shoveling out and imbibing postmodern claptrap. Indeed, it was my sense that things were trending in that direction that led me to pass on a doctorate and pursue other interests. But in one way and another, the education I received as a history major and graduate student has been of value to me.
But you’re right: As it is nowadays, the very worst educational path one can pursue is in the humanities and the social sciences. I emerged from college as a reasonably well-educated person. Today, I’d emerge as a credulous and ignorant Hamas hugger. There is no more education in that sector of the academy; there is only indoctrination. But those on the STEM side of things ought not to be complacent. The comrades are coming for them, too.
If these humanities fields hadn’t been so corrupted by critical theory maybe they’d have more value.
Gee whiz my medieval history degree has been a huge boost to my success (sarc) in my slight defense it was a quality education in the late 80's and I wanted to teach. But the tree is fully rotted now
I’m often keen to tout my own lack of formal education - possibly as a tacit appeal to the idea that I’m a total autodidact - though in reality, I do have two years of community college-level Humanities under my belt, after which I had meant to transition to university until the plan was derailed by some serious circumstances I won’t get into here.
I can say with some certainty (and perhaps vanity) that I had learned most of the ropes about dealing with bigger ideas - sciences, cultural, and otherwise - *before* going to college (at 27), and I sure as hell picked up zero of my writing prowess there.
I remember some of my Profs quite fondly. With the exception of one Prof who fit the archetype of the self-flagellating alpha male who never tired of his hifalutin ideas for a perfect society that I always butted heads with, I found that the Humanities department at my school was patient and compassionate. At the time, I was flirting with Libertarianism and Climate Skepticism, and they were pretty good about it, though unopposed. I have since abandoned both ideas.
Anyway, there was a heap of idealism in the Humanities that had always made me uncomfortable, and I had always gotten the impression it was unsustainable. Sure enough, wait a few years, and anything not founded on anything falsifiable is prone to corruption leading to splinter sects, like religions.
There was a time I would have recommended the Humanities for those who wanted a plurality of ideas with which to expand their minds rather than to major in one narrow field of specialty, but no longer. I don’t even feel like it’s too reliable for that (although, in fairness, all I hear about the school system is the most controversial stuff, and I haven’t been intimately familiar with schooling in years otherwise, so I caution to not take my word as cardinal).
You hit on a good point that resonated with me: classifying the STEM fields as a social science. I feel that as well about basically every discipline in which collaboration and cooperation is necessary. Not all social contracts will be lain out under the rubric of the Humanities. Ironically, I don’t consider them social sciences because I don’t consider them sciences. Disciplines, yes. But they lack the falsifiability and replicability of the scientific method.
Ultimately, I would discourage schooling for those who don’t have a clear vision for a career or life path. If you have a talent and a knack for learning the ropes the hard way, you can still get by on your own accord, even if you don’t have credentials. It just takes some cunning and persistence.
Oh, I mean classifying some social sciences as fields of STEM if they have enough rigor. Social sciences are like psychology, linguistics, etc. Sociology is probably useless though when there’s social psychology and since sociology gives us all the “studies” nonsense.
So Michaela woke up and chose verbal violence today... 😂
This was a fun piece. While every generation has its strong individuals who defy the stereotypes, you're not wrong about Boomer 'culture'... and it certainly got us rolling down the 'humanities' pathway 🤦🏻
As to your future posts? I'll do my best to keep up, but my simpleton's mind oft gets lost in the arithmetics.
It's a thing, I've come to accept it... 😉
You get her. Kudos.
It’s when someone has a conversation with me and assumes they’re dumb as I never went to university.
They’ll tell to me and then drop in that they have a degree, as it that means anything to me, but not state what it’s a degree in. Usually social studies 😂😂. What a worthless degree to be in debt for. No wonder they’re dying for Biden to forgive all their debts.
Proof humanities are communism!
Is it not a shame that the humanities are corrupted and infected with grim rationalists addicted to deconstruction and laze? The search for meaning and answering questions about ought instead of is can be of immense usage.
The issue that the humanities have is that there is no mechanism for accordance and esteem anymore. While there is much to criticize about our modern-data driven research, we can understand that there is a pathway to reach agreement among peers and general society through this mechanism. When you question the mechanism, you question the entire field, but assuming the mechanism, the entire field shines true.
There is not a mechanism in modern English, history, or art departments to separate the wheat from the chaff, which means that esteem is won not by work, but by convincing people you have esteem, which is innately activist.
(Note: it is my guess that the ancient polymath gathered credibility from non-humanities, which gave their tastes an edge in them. The rigor of humanities is participation in non-humanities.)
This has basically been my impression. I'm also still a fan of the arts, but not sure why people can't just go to art school for that, or tutoring, or even self-teach. Lots of the best artists are, and not remotely only ones that have a "naïve" style. You basically need to know enough math to do perspective, enough biology for anatomy and botany, enough physics for optics... Similar things can be said about music, poetry, etc.
I still appreciate "humanities" in the sense of arts, talking politics, etc. hence "college humanities" being my complaint, though I don't think talking politics is generally called "having a humanities discussion" when you're with your relatives for the holidays and a fight breaks out with your relatives who you know disagree and think you're going to Hell too and whatever.
The cocktail party talk classes! The sciences are more fun but numbers and metrics are absolutely fickle based on the human too and machine. I felt like I had to take the but I like the social sciences even though they are less likely to do replacative work to where it becomes scientific law like Newtons Laws. There won't, I don't think, ever be alot of scientific law in the social sciences due to the ever changing human and societal organism and how variables cause all kinds of changes in human behavior because our emotions and senses are manipulated all the time. I will say the ancient polymaths studied everything and math was there. I also think that data driven decisions now should be questioned because metrics are always manipulated.
Social sciences are probably just harder. Humans are more complicated than rocks or stars, unless you bring in the fringe hypothesis about rocks and stars that lead to things like crystal healing, astrology, and conscious universe types of hypotheses (which aren't all the same, one could be true and not others, but similar enough) and then you're back to square 1 because you're talking about people and the effects of things on people. I basically agree with this (an idea people often don't even consider because of all the propaganda, admittedly mostly from humanities majors yet again, that all the so-called Romantics hated science:)
"When categorizing the many disciplines of science that developed during this period, Romantics believed that explanations of various phenomena should be based upon vera causa, which meant that already known causes would produce similar effects elsewhere.[2]: 15 It was also in this way that Romanticism was very anti-reductionist: they did not believe that inorganic sciences were at the top of the hierarchy but at the bottom, with life sciences next and psychology placed even higher.[2]: 19 This hierarchy reflected Romantic ideals of science because the whole organism takes more precedence over inorganic matter, and the intricacies of the human mind take even more precedence since the human intellect was sacred and necessary to understanding nature around it and reuniting with it."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism_in_science
Popper, Feyerabend, etc. also supported Romantic science, not positivism, much to the dismay of all the people who've heard things about Popper and think he's on their side and quote him (which Holly MathNerd will be writing about in an entirely different context, the paradox of tolerance, soon, so maybe I should cover Romantic science while she's doing that.)
https://substack.com/@hollymathnerd
Have you seen some of the interviews with Donald Hoffman where he talks about what he's been working on at length or I think his name is John Lennox?
Well, decide who it is I should watch first and then I will!
Lennox then Hoffman. Lex Friedman and Hoffman particularly.
Love that last point
I’m okay with getting rid of Humanities degrees, but not the subjects. A Classical education is an excellent pre-professional course choice. The humanities are the basis of human thought and creativity. The early scientists and mathies were immersed in history and philosophy and theology. They knew better than to think human nature is basically good. It doesn’t take a concentration in history to grasp that there’s nothing new under the sun. Would you become a mathematician by ignoring Euclid because he’s not modern? STEM is less than STEAM. I believe the problem is premature specialization. A solid liberal arts education can be completed in secondary school. But currently there’s no space or time for it because students have to complete college-level classes instead.
There are plenty of vocational and two-year degree schools.
Pushing college learning into secondary schools has brought about the death of liberal arts, to the detriment of STEM occupations. I am referring to the dearth of ethics and integrity present in today’s corporate culture.
NB: None of this is meant to justify the usurpation of humanities departments by progressive academicians to further their own political agenda.
Probably. That ties into all my ranting about corporations as well. I don't really see the use of humanities degrees except to teach more humanities, so maybe they're not entirely useless, but even then, if everyone learned this stuff like you said, would we really need them? I don't want people to just have a completely utilitarian tech education, but I still question all the things that are taught in humanities courses that often just feel like pure entertainment. Maybe we should be reading Euclid's Elements and Lucretius (even if he wasn't very accurate about lots of things) and things like that in humanities classes. And let's read lots of German naturalists.
Even if we keep humanities courses around, the emphases seem to be all in the wrong places. I wouldn't make it all super STEM centric but I don't know why we can't be reading way more basically sci-fi and fantasy in humanities classes, even though I'm just calling classics sci-fi and fantasy in this case. Probably humanities classes are largely run by huge conformists who don't like things they can't understand, and think books with robots and dragons in them are just weird. We probably don't need to spend so much time on humanities as STEM anyway but we could increase the quality a lot while decreasing the quantity. Like let's just have people read the good books and maybe write fewer reports or something. The idea anyone should focus mostly on humanities feels like a distraction, but yeah, I wouldn't want people never reading books again. I've had to get myself to be like "it's OK, novels aren't a waste of time due to being 'fake,' history books won't send you back to the past" just to get myself to read things that aren't academic again. All the good scientists and mathematicians and even inventors and engineers like what you referred to as the subjects though.
Exactly
While I sense there is some overlap in our viewpoints, articles like this one are why I have not become a subscriber. I have two assertions to make counter to this screed: the first is that studying the Humanities is vital to becoming a full participant in a democracy. The second is that Humanities departments, as such, were systematically eviscerated in the 1990s, as I witnessed firsthand as a student a major midwestern land-grant university. (I was able to take a Humanities class from one of the last great professors in the topic, where we read and discussed Voltaire, Pope, Goethe, et. al. The University was at the tail end of phasing the department out, which by the time I got to University consisted of only two, very elderly professors). Point being, the dragon you think you’re tilting at was slain long ago.
Humanities has been supplanted by various “Studies” (Womens Studies, Cultural Studies, etc.). Which I think is maybe what you’re thinking of here?
Very true
The Humanities have been a horrible mistake that cost us endless wars and suffering since Socrates and Plato. Magic Kingdoms of the mind that have been nightmares since the Thirty Tyrants of Athens, who killed per capita numbers equal to Stalin or Mao.
No more living in abstractions.
Death to the Humanities.
No troll, completely serious.
Well, when you're bored and have nothing to think about except a cup of cappuccino, you might remember that the Humanities help to make us functioning human beings.
No, they take what is decent in us and leverage these decent impulses...and the gullible trust of youth ....and leverage same for money, rice bowls, power.
No, they are at best 2500 years old if we start with Socrates.
But the problem you see are Humanities professors from Socrates to now playing General and sending out their military age male students and female camp followers (yes you are, ladies) to raise Hell.
That’s the biggest problem.
There’s others, like overproduction of elites (or told they’re elites) with no skills but mischief and arbitrage, arbitrage a gentle term for grift.
Then we get to whom we’re leaving the kids with, this is an increasing curve of madness.
Finally and not least in America and it’s Empire at home and abroad the school is the real local government, control and taxation authority, any people’s Revolution would and usually does recognize this instantly and proceeds accordingly. The local police and National Intelligence agencies are a trifle compared to the schools.
In sum NO, this ends.
How do you understand your culture unless you know its history, literature, art, and philosophy?
Why do we need academia to do this?
We don't need you, you need us, but we can't afford you in terms of trouble, strife, mischief and money.
Rice Bowlers who fill children's minds with poison.
"Liberal arts instruction produces liberals. Done right, this can mean classical liberals, which is rather nice. Classical liberalism can be delightful if buffered with enough Christianity and common sense. Liberal arts done poorly produces a different sort of liberal: the kind that loves government programs but still believes in freedom of expression and a few other freedoms. Liberal arts done really badly produces Marxists, Wall St. Occupiers, woketards, and truculent baristas with massive student loan debt."
https://rulesforreactionaries.substack.com/p/rule-5-teach-more-practical-arts