ChadamsApr 15, 2025
I 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.
Show threadRandom Tux UserApr 15, 2025

@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.

Show threadChadams
@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.
Apr 15, 2025 at 1:42pmWeb
Show threadRandom Tux UserApr 15, 2025

@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.