Because not everybody wants to be in STEM. And because even those who are in STEM need to know that humanity does not live by STEM alone. (We'd like our STEM to treat people like humans, rather than like machines.)
A "liberal education" originally meant that those who pursued it were free. They weren't pursuing an education of mere techniques, which was for slaves. Even today, there is a place for learning things that don't have a direct economic impact, as part of becoming an educated person.
That's from the more idealistic side of me. Now here comes the cynicism. Why? Because people still want to major in them, so that they can say that they have a college degree without having to major in something rigorour. And those people pay tuition. And the colleges like getting paid.
Plenty of non stem majors are very rigorous. Philosophy is particularly so. My undergraduate roommate wrote a 50 page paper that had to have original ideas that was critiqued by professors who are quite adept at spotting fallacies and picking apart arguments.
> Even today, there is a place for learning things that don't have a direct economic impact, as part of becoming an educated person.
Sure, but we shouldn't assume that college is the appropriate place to do so or that the way colleges teach the humanities is effective. If your supermarket forced you to do aerobic exercises before entering, I'm not sure a good justification for it would be "well, aerobic exercise is good for you and not everything is about buying food."
I guess it really depends on what you think the purpose of college is. To me, that's exactly what college and high school should be for -- learning things that don't have a direct economic impact but that make you a more educated/well-rounded person. They shouldn't just be about job training, which should be focused in technical schools, and it actually saddens me that so many think the purpose of university/high school should be job training (really, that should be the companies themselves, but of course they don't want to pay the money to invest in their hires).
We get a bit sidetracked by terminology here - if we suddenly called a college a technical school, would it suddenly be fine to remove the humanities from the curriculum? One of the big problems when we discuss these things is that there's so much inertia stemming from our preconceived notions of what a college is. It stops us from examining what are actual goals are, and if what we're doing is effective in achieving them.
I don't think the early comment that humanities is approached better as a hobby is necessarily wrong. It's quite possible that other approaches, like the Chautauqua movement, would be much more effective (my personal experience suggests it would).
Because music, history, and literature are just as important to human society as math, computer science, and physics. This unthinking disrespect for the humanities is embarrassing.
So, the only thing in life you enjoy is math? Because if you enjoy music or tv or novels or dance or sport or anything else, you enjoy something that doesn't deserve your respect. And why would you enjoy something like that?
> Why are they even taught in colleges? They're more of a hobby thing really (and more enjoyable that way imo)
Because that's why colleges exist...? Historically universities were not the workforce mills they are today. You did not go to a university to help you find work. Stuff like business/management, engineering, medicine, etc really shouldn't be part of universities.
It's interesting how you go in two sentences from returning to goals of historical universities to suggesting that medicine shouldn't be part of it.
A classic full university was supposed to cover the four historically major fields of study - theology, medicine, law and philosophy (which includes all the modern subtypes of PhD's e.g. physics, math, biology, etc). Three of these fields were pretty much designed to prepare students for the specific needs of knowledge intensive work (clerics, doctors and lawyers) and only the philosophy studies were less practical.
Why is science even taught in college? All you need is a math book and YouTube to have people show you how to do the mechanical steps needed to solve problems.
(I'm sarcastic of course. Sciences and humanities are both cool and good and contribute to a better understanding of the world around us, and one wouldn't be much without the other.)
Because the operation (not just the physical structure) of the human brain (a complex neural network) and networks of brains (society) are just as important, if not more important subjects of study than physical systems and computers. Or are you suggesting that we completely abandon the understanding of human behavior at scale?
Is there any evidence of this? To me it seems like humanities makes people have less empathy, since instead of feeling other people they analyze them.
For example, to me it seems like American politicians have way less empathy than European politicians even though European politicians have studied way less humanities than American ones. So my belief that studying humanities helps you deconstruct the human experience and see us as robots, hurting your empathy.
I do however believe that studying humanities makes it easier to answer what the tester wants you to answer on empathy tests, since you now understand those tests better.
I don't have scientific evidence. But my wife is a historian and the process of doing history is fundamentally the process of erasing your own context and placing yourself fulling in somebody else's context. That's fundamentally the practice of empathy.
