In Defense of the Humanities

I recently read an article about the declining interest in the humanities in higher education. In the last decade, graduates seem to be majoring more and more in the fields of science and engineering and less and less in those perennial mainstays, English and history. Even fewer are doing the smaller disciplines like classics, philosophy, or art history. With the tech boom, the entrepreneurial bravado, the start-ups, and the worry over finding a job, fields like computer science, mechanical engineering, economics, and biology seem more practical. After all, understanding Shakespeare is nowhere as marketable as understanding business.

I was a humanities child, and I am writing in defense of the fuzzy fields. In true humanities fashion, I don't have data or numbers or evidence, but instead a story. In college at Stanford University, my most influential, memorable, mindboggling, and inspirational teachers were all in the humanities. I loved it; I drank it up; I wanted to emulate them. Lectures about morality, discussions about a short story's narrative decisions, and essays on free will - these were epiphanies, they made sense of the word philosopher, lover of wisdom. The humanities broadened my perspective, engaged me in debate and conversation, guided me into the depths of human emotion, passion, reason, and motivation, and challenged me to ponder and articulate my own thoughts and interpretations.

On the other hand, science was, at least at the introductory level, the memorization and mastery of a new language, codex, book of rules, set of equations, and facts. It tested other equally important skills, the consumption and comprehension of a vast body of knowledge, the logical progression of proofs, the application of the known world to the unknown. The struggle was working through a problem for which we knew there was an answer; we just needed to get there. In the humanities (at least philosophy and creative writing, which I did), an answer was never guaranteed.

Here I am. I was always good at the science, and I knew I wanted to become a physician. But the humanities, which I was not good at, defined me. I struggled all through college with essays, short stories, reading large texts, parsing arguments. I knew I was not going to pursue it as a career. But as education? I would never have given it up.

So I tell those who would be doctors - or economists or businessmen or accountants or scientists or journalists or engineers or pretty much anything - that the humanities in college offers a new skill set, a new world of exploration, a new body of literature that may not offer a high salary career but will offer a depth and meat of living, a different way of thinking, and a new appreciation for the human life and context that is invaluable.

Image of Plato by Silanion is in the public domain, from Wikipedia.