Should the "Humanities" subjects exist?

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Why of course it should. If people choose to study humanities then that's their choice and who are we to try to stop them. Humanities like many other college subjects does need to remove some partisanship from its textsbooks and teachers, but the people who sign up usually know exactly what they are paying/signing up for.
 
wylfım powiedział(a):
I think the issue is more with the way current society is structured. People need to work for a living— it seriously bogs down any sort of progress that requires extensive time. Ancient Greece and Rome, they had slaves to feed people, meaning the aristocracy could afford to spend decades of their life working on things with long-term benefits that aren't otherwise sustainable. There's a reason so many great ideas came from those eras.
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Most of their ideas were shit. Plato's world of forms was bullshit and his concept of philospher kings getting enshrined stealthily into Catholic dogma held back the west for centuries.
 
Your Weird Fetish powiedział(a):
Most of their ideas were shit. Plato's world of forms was bullshit and his concept of philospher kings getting enshrined stealthily into Catholic dogma held back the west for centuries.
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Can't get diamonds without digging through tons of worthless rock, and even running close to a magma vein or two.
 
OfflineCyberBully powiedział(a):
Of course. The Humanities are more than just Gender Studies. They encompass Art, History, Language, Classics, Philosophy, etc. They study those subjects that help define us culturally. The best education would be one grounded in both Science and the Humanities, as it would give the student access to the broadest spectrum of subject matter.

Some of the Humanities, such as Languages, are fundamental to modern society.
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There's too much knowledge for this to work anymore. Specialization beats generalization, and if anything is a necessity if you want people that can actually do anything but be pompous pricks that think they're renaissance men because they know a tiny bit about a lot of things. You know, like me.
 
Student loans/scholarships should not be available for degrees without a real career path and viable job market.
 
Literature is good, and foreign languages are good, but the bullshit 'writing my grad thesis about Marvel movies' needs to stop. The field of humanities would be improved if they severely reduced the amount of graduate students they accepted. All these dumb kids are getting PhDs and thinking they're gonna be professors, and then they wind up adjuncting for 22k a year and writing whiny articles on Medium about how they've been lied to.

I don't think getting a humanities bachelor's degree is a bad idea as long as you're smart about it. Lots of jobs want someone with good writing abilities. Get internships and network and take technical writing classes, and you'll be fine.
 
I mean.. HR and PR, both very viable fields, are categorized under humanities. Especially PR, which indeed currently is an intern handling a social media page, has huge potential.

Absolutely every monkey could be considered a programmer; rarely is the actual efficiency hereof brought up. Likewise you can be an absolute asshat at running a corporate Twitter, or be the next Wendy's.

I'm on the last few semesters of a humanities degree, and it has been confusing as fuck. Instead of checking off theory as you would in STEM, you learn a tidbit of the hundreds of fields humanities touch upon, effectively leaving you with a few basic concepts and a paper qualifying you for a specific level of office work.

I can see why people discredit social and cultural science, but the production of culture, such as art, music, drawing, could be considered equally useless if you're gonna be angsty about it. There's far worse degrees being wasted resources on.

Basically, mix up some shit for the future; organisational culture/management, how to deal with robots/AI, and the emerging importance of internet relations. Shovel classical humanities into the bin with history and gender studies. Half the negativity surrounding this topic comes from those who swear by wage tables and suits.

If you don't wanna deal with people, why belittle those who does it for you?
 
The Man From G.R.I.D.S. powiedział(a):
English lit is a hobby, not something you can or should teach. Education should be vocational, self-study with CLEP-like tests for certs, or both.

Gen ed requirements are ghastly wastes.
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What about English lit in combination with education as a major? Because we've decided as a society that teenagers need to read classic books. It's been like that in Western culture for hundreds of years, so I don't think that'll be changing anytime soon.
 
Crunchy Leaf powiedział(a):
What about English lit in combination with education as a major? Because we've decided as a society that teenagers need to read classic books. It's been like that in Western culture for hundreds of years, so I don't think that'll be changing anytime soon.
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Education is a field in itself, but there's an easy solution. Require certs for the relevant field (english + linguistics) plus education training and practicum. You could learn the info to pass certs at a library and discuss with others online or in local cert study groups.

As you can guess I have a very low opinion of universities and want them made obsolete asap.
 
The Man From G.R.I.D.S. powiedział(a):
Education is a field in itself, but there's an easy solution. Require certs for the relevant field (english + linguistics) plus education training and practicum. You could learn the info to pass certs at a library and discuss with others online or in local cert study groups.

As you can guess I have a very low opinion of universities and want them made obsolete asap.
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So I guess you think the only courses that should be offered at higher education are ones for careers requiring licensure? Architecture, accounting, law, etc.
 
Crunchy Leaf powiedział(a):
So I guess you think the only courses that should be offered at higher education are ones for careers requiring licensure? Architecture, accounting, law, etc.
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At publicly funded, certified, and accredited institutions? Absolutely.

Architecture should be a subfield between engineering, drafting, and design, not a field in itself. Ideally you could take the classes to teach you enough to pass cert tests on testable material, then fuck off to an apprenticeship program for a national organization of architechts. None of this fuck around in school for 6 years bs.

Law is very easily simplified if iq tests are allowed to weed out applicants. You could have a knowledge test required for entry to cut need for a bachelors. After that its best run imo as a part time apprenticeship/classroom program with tiers as you progress in what you can competently handle.

If you want to learn yoga accupunture by all means do so, just don't expect the public to pay for it. Skilled things like acting, dance, painting, belong in apprenticeships run by their respective industries.

Soft sciences have some utility but again are best used in highly practical domains like marketing. Again, they should have knowledge certs/tests required for admission to apprentice programs, and these should be run by private research firms.

Chemistry, math, biology, some geology programs, and engineering are the only ones that are best taught as they currently are, just without gen ed bullshit. Post-grad research and teaching should be done at private research firms. Lets dispense with the illusion that public research unis are anything but research farms run by tenured assholes.

My field (comp sci) is a clusterfuck in universities. Nuke the entire thing, reduce it to certs and vocational ed at community colleges with post bach stuff in private firms. In many places you have better instruction at community colleges than unis.
 
The Man From G.R.I.D.S. powiedział(a):
At publicly funded, certified, and accredited institutions? Absolutely.

Architecture should be a subfield between engineering, drafting, and design, not a field in itself. Ideally you could take the classes to teach you enough to pass cert tests on testable material, then fuck off to an apprenticeship program for a national organization of architechts. None of this fuck around in school for 6 years bs.

Law is very easily simplified if iq tests are allowed to weed out applicants. You could have a knowledge test required for entry to cut need for a bachelors. After that its best run imo as a part time apprenticeship/classroom program with tiers as you progress in what you can competently handle.

If you want to learn yoga accupunture by all means do so, just don't expect the public to pay for it. Skilled things like acting, dance, painting, belong in apprenticeships run by their respective industries.

Soft sciences have some utility but again are best used in highly practical domains like marketing. Again, they should have knowledge certs/tests required for admission to apprentice programs, and these should be run by private research firms.

Chemistry, math, biology, some geology programs, and engineering are the only ones that are best taught as they currently are, just without gen ed bullshit. Post-grad research and teaching should be done at private research firms. Lets dispense with the illusion that public research unis are anything but research farms run by tenured assholes.

My field (comp sci) is a clusterfuck in universities. Nuke the entire thing, reduce it to certs and vocational ed at community colleges with post bach stuff in private firms. In many places you have better instruction at community colleges than unis.
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The issue is that you have too many universities. Not everyone should be going to college, not even most people. Leave it for the top 20,30% of people to test into, and then pay for their education. This includes mandatory research on something useful. You don't write a senior thesis (literature analysis doesn't count), you don't get a degree, and have to pay back all that money. So you better be damn sure you're smart enough to do college and motivated enough to use it.
High school is fucked up too, but thats a completely different story.
 
The Man From G.R.I.D.S. powiedział(a):
At publicly funded, certified, and accredited institutions? Absolutely.

Architecture should be a subfield between engineering, drafting, and design, not a field in itself. Ideally you could take the classes to teach you enough to pass cert tests on testable material, then fuck off to an apprenticeship program for a national organization of architechts. None of this fuck around in school for 6 years bs.

Law is very easily simplified if iq tests are allowed to weed out applicants. You could have a knowledge test required for entry to cut need for a bachelors. After that its best run imo as a part time apprenticeship/classroom program with tiers as you progress in what you can competently handle.

If you want to learn yoga accupunture by all means do so, just don't expect the public to pay for it. Skilled things like acting, dance, painting, belong in apprenticeships run by their respective industries.

Soft sciences have some utility but again are best used in highly practical domains like marketing. Again, they should have knowledge certs/tests required for admission to apprentice programs, and these should be run by private research firms.

Chemistry, math, biology, some geology programs, and engineering are the only ones that are best taught as they currently are, just without gen ed bullshit. Post-grad research and teaching should be done at private research firms. Lets dispense with the illusion that public research unis are anything but research farms run by tenured assholes.

My field (comp sci) is a clusterfuck in universities. Nuke the entire thing, reduce it to certs and vocational ed at community colleges with post bach stuff in private firms. In many places you have better instruction at community colleges than unis.
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I don't entirely agree with you, but I do think there has been too much of a focus on university and not enough on apprenticeships--because companies don't want to train people anymore. The US used to have Supreme Court Justices who'd never been to law school, they'd just had an apprenticeship.

On the other hand, I've seen a lot of comp sci people say they think the self taught software developers with lots of certs types aren't as good as people who've been to college.

The problem with law school in the US is there's no regulations on it. There's laws about how many doctors there can be, but not lawyers, so shady schools will open up law programs (since it doesn't require equipment it's cheap), enroll lots of students and make tons of money, and then throw them out into the world to flounder.
 
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