r/HonestHotTakes • u/[deleted] • 2h ago
casual hot take it's quite disturbing to see people hate on humanities amid the push for stem subjects
[deleted]
7
u/glooble_wooble 1h ago
Until recently it was generally considered better for STEM and humanities to be paired. STEM provides the technical how to but humanities offer the societal context such as ethics, the why/for whom, and generally better communication. Humanities also increase critical thinking and emotional intelligence. The push against humanities is one of the reasons tech is largely filled with soulless bros who don’t or can’t care about other people or how things could negatively impact society as a whole.
I think it is also worth noting that this is one of the reasons that Asian parents of STEM kids also push them heavily to learn music. It’s to create a “whole person” instead of a half developed human with low emotional intelligence and discipline.
9
u/JustHere4TheZipLines 2h ago
Cool. I’ll take a small latte please. Whole milk is fine.
4
u/pucks4brains 2h ago
You think you are slaying here but you are really just showing yourself to be exactly the kind of brainwashed tool the post is worried about. Good luck though!
1
2
u/whichonewerecowards 1h ago
Why do you feel the need to resort to insults and condescending remarks instead of actually addressing the topic? It just makes you look really obnoxious and ignorant. Speaking as an engineering grad btw
1
2
-1
2h ago
[deleted]
3
u/Saiyanjin1 2h ago
They mean, the main issue with none practical fields is it can often not lead to financial success and in the world we live in today, it’s real hard to get by with little to no money.
3
u/ViewLongjumping1732 1h ago
To get into an elite school for STEM, you still need to understand the humanities well enough to get straight As in them.
A lot of kids trying to get into top schools for STEM still need to take Art History, European History, Psychology to limit the number of non-AP classes you are forced to take from dragging down your GPA.
Is not that you are treated as not smart enough for having knowledge in the humanities, it's more that that the best students in the humanities tend to pursue STEM subjects, while the students that don't perform as well tend to pursue the humanities. It's not like there a huge divide, as schools tend to be fairly equal in terms of admissions profiles, but humanities majors are pretty consistently at the bottom where there is publicly available data.
It's not like CS Majors coming out of a rank 100 university are doing too hot these days either.
3
u/Mundane_Stomach5431 2h ago
One factor contributing to this issue is that authoritarian forms of woke ideology have monopolized much of Academic spaces, rendering many humanities departments into primarily ideological, anti liberal replication factories that degrade the perceived value of Humanities subjects for imparting the ability to think indepedently and in context.
Other factors are a general dumbing down of society due to electronic media, hyper capitalism, and consumerism, and I agree that this is a major and unfortunate issue.
-2
u/Capital-Self-3969 2h ago
Wow, so that first paragraph is a right wing conspiracy theory.
1
u/bentbabe 47m ago
The funniest thing is I went to one of those schools that is known for being super woke. My professors were all the sort to look at the attitude of "how dare anyone be a Republican" and immediately stamp that sentiment out.
Like. The people who claim that "woke ideology" or whatever infests those colleges have no idea what they are talking about.
I took classes all over the map, from hard sciences, to the social sciences, languages, humanities, etc. The professors there wanted us to think critically and challenge ourselves. They cared that we came away having learned something.
1
u/AutoModerator 2h ago
Hello! I’m AutoMod, and I’ll be hanging out in the comments on every post. Be sure to give our rules a quick read, and most importantly, have fun in the subreddit! Feel free to join our discord! https://discord.gg/EGXtuyUC
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
1
u/JobberStable 2h ago
Its all about “what am I spending money on”. Nobody is suggesting airline pilots need to spend money on some humanities classes before they get their degree and some degrees are very technical
3
u/YourOtherNorth 1h ago
I think the point is that the education system is organized to build well rounded citizens while the prospective pilot is looking for the fastest way to the cockpit.
1
u/JobberStable 1h ago
Im not disagreeing, but I think as prices skyrocket, more and more people are questioning why they have to take mandatory humanities. And for some people they hope there was a more direct pipeline to the technical field they are going in.
1
u/YourOtherNorth 1h ago
I think we agree.
The disconnect is between what the public is demanding and what the education system wants to provide.
1
u/Frongopongo 1h ago
The following is merely and opinion, so don’t take this as gospel:
I think part of the reason why humanities is dismissed is because humanities, among other subjects, are supposed to help you become a well rounded person. There’s obviously nothing wrong with that, but I’m not surprised parents want their kids to focus on careers with high ROI, regardless of whether it’s paid for by you or the taxpayer. There’s a finite amount of time in this world and a lot of people just want to finish their degree and transition into their careers. There’s more to the world than sitting in a classroom listening to someone talk all day and doing assignments. I personally never enjoyed sitting through classes writing down notes, I just wanted to get after my internship and work on my career. I’m not saying the humanities have 0 value, but just because something has value does not mean it’s practical. Some folks have this notion that if you don’t care about the humanities in uni you’re all of the sudden and ignorant fool who will never bother with the subjects after, which is a stupid elitist notion imo. Also I will say in my personal experience with professors in the humanities, they were some of the most close minded people ever. Lots of bias politically as well but I didn’t go there to learn politics so it’s a nothing burger so to speak.
Anyway feel free to downvote lmao
1
u/JayRandom212 1h ago
The humanities are important...but do I need to pay $thousands to learn them?
Can't you just read books?
1
1
u/Typical-Tax1584 43m ago
STEM is such a trap, there are only a few subjects that take you from school to work. Most of STEM requires another degree or two before you're able to do anything.
Humanities gets a bad wrap because it's not a 1:1 straight line between your studies and a career. It's very flexible and you can carve out a pathway, but you have to build some skills to pair it with. It's also seen as "easy A's or easy degree" so you have some lazy kids go for it and they simply don't have the drive to succeed (yet) and then get all shocked pikachu when they have nothing to show for it. I knew too many of these types, just hoping to coast through class, bare minimum.
I'm not a STEM guy, I got a BFA in painting, and while I would have loved to be an artist social media didn't exist yet so I didn't have access to something like that as an outlet to build an audience. So I got various jobs. System Admin Jr., Administrative Coordinator, and while I was working I went for an MBA in marketing.
I transitioned to a communications job and ended up learning graphic design which was a great fit given my arts background and marketing knowledge. Eventually, I got another masters in Integrated Design and while I'm not hauling in the big bucks, I do make low six figures, have never been fired or laid off, and have a massive pile of skills since I never stopped learning new stuff.
I know engineers who make less than me, lots of people in tech have been laid off, people with narrow roles and narrow skill sets are in danger with AI imo.
I don't think STEM is better than humanities nor do I think the opposite. They're just knowledge bases and ways of thinking. It's up to YOU, the person, to figure out how to adapt any methodologies you've learned into practical skills. Everyone is on a crooked journey through life, nothing is going to get handed to you.
1
u/Purple-Blueberry3721 2h ago
In a vacuum I agree, but in practice the people studying humanities are often doing some combination of the following:
- be left-wing and be bigoted against men / whites / Christians
- demand that people who didn't study now pay for student loan forgiveness via their tax money
- or have no real-world experience and have only been in a left-wing bubble, yet act like they know how to solve all the world's problems
- insist on creating a left-wing-only bubble in their studies, and be harsh against right-wing students, even though the humanities aren't inherently left-wing
- often modern humanity studies focuses more on tearing down Western society than building something, which I think at this point isn't useful. We've done endless deconstruction; go build something new, hence people saying "go into STEM and build something." Now yes the humanities can theoretically be constructive but it's not how it's often used.
It's, well, human for people to push back against people doing these things. Even though studying the humanities is valid and has some value.
1
u/Jubsz91 1h ago
Having a well rounded education is important and good for society. Going into debt to study the gender dynamics of the Renaissance era for 4 years is a bad life decision.
1
u/YourOtherNorth 1h ago
It also doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't study subjects that aren't economically viable. It just means you shouldn't pay a university to do it.
1
u/Electronic_Quiet9140 2h ago
Unfortunately the humanities don't produce anything of value anymore. There is no Shakespeare or Michelangelo. Just a bunch of idiots doing gender studies nonsense and writing about how white people are bad. STEM fields actually produce things of value that makes society move forward.
3
1h ago
[deleted]
1
u/Electronic_Quiet9140 1h ago
You are correct, but that does not apply only to white people. The Japanese don't care about Bangladesh people either. Neither do the people in Qatar. Anyone who makes this issue about only about white people is an anti-white racist and a bourgeois opportunist. This is an issue of capitalism and the labor aristocracy.
0
1h ago
[deleted]
2
u/Electronic_Quiet9140 1h ago
The point is that many "academics" will point out the privileges of whites, but fail to mention that many other racial and ethnic groups are just as privileged. This by its nature obscures the class nature of society and capitalism, because it is not races that are privileged under capitalism, but classes. So identity politics and intersectionality (DEI and anti-white racism for example) is used by the capitalists in the West to divide the working class.
1
1h ago
[deleted]
2
u/Electronic_Quiet9140 52m ago
The current social changes are difficult to analyze in the West, but I believe that the social and moral decline is due to the disappearance of the traditional industrial proletariat. Historically, it has always been socially conservative, so they could not be manipulated my modern identity politics. With the disappearance of the industrial proletariat in the West, there is now room for more decadence as people become more atomized in their service sector jobs. There are no more factories where you work collectively with 1000+ people, so there is no longer a shared value system. So now the bourgeois propaganda exploits this atomization by creating various idols for different groups of people (trans rights, animal rights, etc.)
0
u/Objective-Plum3275 2h ago
Depends how humanities are taught. In an ideal world they would indeed give you a nuanced understanding of the world but in reality, most humanities departments are left-leaning activist echo chambers. Just the fact that you assume that you need to study humanities at university to understand that fascism is bad screams "everyone I dont like is a n*zi"
1
u/YourOtherNorth 26m ago
I wonder if anyone has done a study of humanities faculty and determined what percentage of them have had enough "real world" life experience to even have a nuanced understanding of the world.
0
0
u/Intrepid_Bobcat_2931 1h ago
"Fascism" is the label Putin uses about Ukraine, and USA, and has done so for 20+ years.
Russian tactics copy and paste.
0
1h ago
[deleted]
2
u/Intrepid_Bobcat_2931 1h ago
No, and the fact that you fail to understand that is evidence that your opinion can be discarded outright, and whatever time you spent on studying humanities was completely wasted. Now finish bagging my food.
-1
u/YourOtherNorth 1h ago
All of my music major friends went back for masters degrees because they couldn't feed themselves with music.
Lots of things that are worth studying won't pay the bills, but most us don't have the silver spoon required to get a degree with a negative ROI.
1
1h ago
[deleted]
2
u/YourOtherNorth 1h ago
I don't think it's strictly an economic problem.
I think it's a problem with people being naturally uncurious and therefore being motivated by economics to get the minimum effective education.
It's the "I just want the degree to get the good job" mentality that's resulted in decades of bad public behavior/policy that's broken the system.
1
1h ago
[deleted]
1
u/YourOtherNorth 1h ago
I don't. I'm married to an elementary education reading specialist in a poor district.
That doesn't make me an education expert by a long shot, but it does mean I spend an unusual amount of time talking about education.
These are people who have a multi generational culture of being uncurious and are happy being ignorant. When provided with opportunity, they don't take it for themselves or their children. I think we are reaching the point where all the ambitious poor will have escaped these communities.
8
u/Nojopar 2h ago
So fun historical story - Google didn't invent Google Earth/Maps. It was created by a company called Keyhole around 2001. Google acquired them in about 2004. There's still a tiny piece of them left around in the file format name - KML stands for Keyhole Markup Language (KMZ is just a zipped Keyhole Markup file). Keyhole was a bunch of geographers and software engineers working together to make this (at the time) incredibly revolutionary map. It took both camps to do as the programmers could make it happen, but they really didn't understand how map experts used maps nor how spatial principles were important.
When Google bought the company, the fired all the geographers because they wanted the tech and the engineers. They figured they didn't need geographers for any of that. A few years later, they figured out they were so, so, so tragically wrong about that and hired a bunch of them back. Since then, most of the software folk on Google Maps/Earth get a crash course in geographic concepts at a bare minimum, ideally hiring people who do both geography and software engineer.
STEM people - and I'm a STEM person - always think the humanities and social sciences isn't particularly important to what they do. The really smart ones figure out pretty quickly how wrong they are.