ChadamsI hope all the STEM people who thought maybe we could simply do without all that pesky humanities education now understand how ridiculous that notion always has been.
clewThe STEM people who thought that are mostly happy with how it’s going.
@clew ... yeh. The "hope" in that sentence is probably doing a bit too much work, isn't it? 😔
Plus also, the Heidegger problem. No knowledge of the humanities has been enough to make people good, not even in the millennia when there wasn’t any science or engineering.
@clew In my experience, humanities studies tend to make people more intensely who they were always going to be. If that makes sense. 😅
need a social scientist here to consider this as a testable proposition
secret third thing!
Robin Barton@thecityinspeech Science tells us what we can do but the humanities tell us what we should and should not do
@Robo105 I'd offer that religion tells us what we should and should not do, while the humanities invite us to figure out for ourselves what we should or should not do. No reason they can't work in harmony, though!
@thecityinspeech I am not religious at all but I know religion has driven people do to great things; abolition, education, child labour rights. Like all things it has also been used for evil but that is also true of the humanities
I agree they can work in harmony.
I agree they can work in harmony.
GreyCat, Red Mage@thecityinspeech @Robo105 stem is the bricks, humanities are the mortar
@greycat @thecityinspeech I like that saying
@thecityinspeech @Robo105 thank you, it's the only clever thing I've ever said
@greycat @thecityinspeech I very much doubt that is the only clever thing you have said. You strike me as intelligent
Dark Phoenix 🇺🇦🇨🇦🇬🇱🇵🇦🇵🇸🏳️🌈@thecityinspeech that is how we got STEAM
@Darkphoenix We didn't really get the arts, though. We've been systematically defunding them and devaluing the cultural and economic contributions of artists, philosophers, writers, and other people in the humanities for decades. This isn't a timeline that has embraced the liberal arts.
@thecityinspeech I'm old. We had band and chorus in school, and woodshop and home ec. I played with our band in the Disneyland Main Street parade. It was the highlight of my secondary education. (I really hated jr and sr high school. I was a geek, living in a ski resort)
It breaks my heart that so many kids are being deprived of that whole culture
It breaks my heart that so many kids are being deprived of that whole culture
@Darkphoenix I lucked out through a combination of having an artsy family and having a public school system that supported the arts (though less and less over time), but our school was absolutely an outlier in our area in its strong support of the arts, and that support has dwindled over the years.
small cypressOur university used "STEAM" as an excuse to cut art and music requirements for future teachers, because the STEM professors would do one little watercolor activity once a semester with them and call it a day
@small_cypress @Darkphoenix aaaaaAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH 😞
Sea Hag 🦭@thecityinspeech I also wish ethics were a part of every STEM curriculum. Not just as a separate class but as part of every class.
@hagaesthetic Hear, hear!
Ericka Simone@thecityinspeech nope. Most are doubling down.
@ErickaSimone Not most people around me! But I have certainly spent recent days despairing.
Greg@thecityinspeech Having made the mistake of popping on LinkedIn today, I'm afraid we are hoping in vain. The inhumane tech trend machine, the automated Dunning Kruger Device, the Torment Nexus dev team chat, is churning away every day there.
@greg LinkedIn makes me want to call it quits on the entire Internet experiment sometimes
contrasocialNot understanding the value of the humanities is a symptom of only being able to think in the most literal terms, which is sadly a kind of intrinsic mental deficit that can't be overcome through experiences.
Random Tux User@thecityinspeech
At least in the US, I think this is partly because of how high schools handle it, my high school was pretty good in making the humanities actually interesting, like I was actually interested in the history classes. And as a result, I have interest in humanities, even if I'm a computer science person.
On the other hand, if the humanities is just made into a class of just memorizing things that happened and terms and concepts, then no one cares about it.
@enthusiast101 In a school system obsessed with quantifying and ranking students (for all sorts of reasons too numerous to get into), there is pressure to reduce complex subjects down to what can be easily captured in a 90-minute test. Even my best humanities classes in public school were not free from this influence.
@thecityinspeech
Yeah, I definitely saw some of that too, but fortunately my teachers tried to make it interesting for the parts that were not just test preparation.
I had a government teacher who had tests and homework but that was mostly just as a formality. The actual teaching happened during the class lectures and despite the 90 something students, she tried to make it as engaging as possible by talking and expecting answers and actually having discussion.
Bakunin Boys@thecityinspeech as a former dumbarse, in my defense, a lot of humanities is full of crap.
@bakuninboys I wish to note that this is not about being dumb or smart! It's about seeing and being able to articulate the value of a holistic liberal arts approach to education.
As for "a lot" of humanities being "full of crap," I would invite you to say more? There are certainly stronger and weaker professional practitioners of the humanities, but I don't think I'd say the subjects themselves are nonsensical or unworthy of study.
@thecityinspeech for me, it's in-curiosity which makes someone an idiot, not intellect.
I am talking colloquially, so yeah it was the people, but it will sometimes affect the fields themselves. An early encounter with the humanities were folks talking about Einstein as the cause of nuclear weapons. I saw a lot of it as sophistry then.
The problem seems to stem from in-curiosity in both directions. There are big holes in science (GUT) and mathematics (Hilbert/Godel) and philosophy is spending its time navel gazing. I recently read "Philosophy is now less philosophy and more philosophy history", and that rings true for me.
There's also a lack of culpability. The "now I am become death", I mean, it's a bad place to be, but at least it's a scientist who said it. But the humanities will harbour religion gleefully without taking stock of the damage it has done. It does not own Qanon as downstream from religion. It does not own flat earthers and post-truth. It does not own religion as the powerful muddying force which allows fascism to come into being.
There's no quote of a pope saying "I led us to desolation. I salted the earth and now my crops will not grow".
Also TERFs -- the term exists for a reason. That's born of feminism. That's some big missteps in feminist theory right there.
But yeah, it's the people. You find the right crowd, and they do take action on this stuff. They're protesting, they're fighting, they understand and explain, and it's holistic. I must say, among them, the best appear to be those who have synthesised a technical background with a non-technical one.
In a way, it is a "99% of everything sucks". Find a random book and it won't be useful, but there are green pastures, and there are a lot of questions that only the humanities can answer. In computing, an increasing number of my real-world problems are philosophy.
So it's on me. I didn't find it, but I also didn't look. The haystack is pretty big though.
@bakuninboys Thank you for taking the time to say more! I'm enthusiastically on the same page with you in much of what you're saying here, especially about the role of in-curiosity. Perhaps my experience of formal humanities edu was more agnostic than yours. I don't view philosophy as divorced from the physicists and mathematicians you mentioned and the projects they pursued (misunderstandings of causality in the case of nuclear weaponry notwithstanding)!
@bakuninboys But I recognize that modern pedagogical practice has in many cases degraded the quality of philosophical discourse and turned academia inward when it should be reaching out.
@bakuninboys Academia can certainly harbor enclaves of people who share bad and inhumane and antidemocratic ideas. I wanted to understand what your experience of the humanities was such that it should be associated with this, but if it was the in-curious folks at work, then that makes a lot of sense.
@thecityinspeech While even in universities, academic practise (in both technical and non-technical fields) can often be grounded in obfuscation, there's enough tight discourse there that you can find (across domains) good arguments.
My initial contact with the humanities was in my schooling, and the big issue is that you have a huge mix of teachers, teaching styles, and personalities. Some don't like or respect technical fields. Others can use the flexible nature of humanities teaching to take points away from the students they don't like. Add to that the sometimes poor understanding of the material they're covering, and... well... I had to start digging myself to find what I was looking for.
I think a lot of folks suffer in similar and different ways for the sciences. It's an issue in schools where sometimes a bad teacher can just put you off a field.