It's questionable that the humanities teach thinking. This stream of essays by humanities profs isn't a good advert for their own thinking abilities, let alone their ability to teach it. In fairness this specific article isn't too hard on the phones, but the essay could have been shrunk to one sentence: we aren't allowed to fail students so they see no reason to study. That the entire explanation needed. Everything else is just flavour.

So if they're all about teaching how to think, where are the brilliantly thought out ideas for tackling their problem? Surely that's where their own skills should be valuable?

> It's questionable that the humanities teach thinking.

Philosophy is an obvious counter to that claim. It's hard to see how anyone could major in a humanities and not think, even with LLMs. But perhaps the problem is thinking that requiring everyone to take a sampling of intro humanities courses will force them to think instead of just getting by.

> we aren't allowed to fail students so they see no reason to study.

But that wasn't the issue previously for a majority of this professor's 30 years teaching, it's something that changed recently.

How is that your takeaway??

I pulled out trend lines of capability and made projections from this, and easily avoided the red meat of testing and humanities.

They don’t have a solution, because it’s a system level issue - well beyond what teachers, who are already underfunded, can do.

This is the alarm bell being rung.

If coming up with systems-level solutions to systems-level problems isn't what learning how to think means, then what does it mean?