And the thing is! It’s not even about “being boring”! It is so not about that! With a humanities degree, the only thing you really learn is how to process information, and generally, these degrees are designed to give it to you via various different perspectives and frameworks: you receive it, contextualize it, and then you’re encouraged to make an argument about it. That’s literally it, for years.
...And when people are no longer in uni (no matter their degree), a lot of them enter the work force and are too tired to do any outside learning--like, say, consuming nonfiction about politics, the environment, social sciences or racism, or fiction that heavily features those themes (or, featured enough that the person spends a not significant amount of time thinking/talking them through). This makes sense: we live in a late-capitalist hellscape and everyone is tired. Sitting down to read Audre Lord at the end of my workday is a tough call when Good Omens is literally right there. It’s not that I don’t want to do it, it’s that I have to force myself, because I spent the whole day not having fun, and I have 5 hours before I have to go to bed and not have fun again tomorrow.
So most people don’t make this effort in their own time--which, again, fair. Ideally, then, you’d want to at least train yourself to think this way while in school, right? My ability to incorporate multiple perspectives into my critiques of even stupid shit, like reality TV, far outstrips my STEM, MBA and CompSci friends who don’t do a lot of self-directed learning--not because I’m smarter by any means, but because I was literally trained to question every piece of information I was given and then told to make an argument about it, and I was given a lot of texts with themes of facism, racism, classicism, sexism, religion, colonization, het- and amatonormativity, etc etc the list goes on. When you consume enough of this shit, it becomes easier to spot--and if you don’t practice, you get rusty as fuck.
This whole “university is a business and teaches employable skills” thing is pretty recent; people used to go to trade schools for that. If you were at university, you were there to learn how to think. And theoretically, humanities degrees are poised to make humans who are much harder to fool with things like propaganda and mob mentality. Question anyone who is celebrating the decline of this kind of learning, degrading it, or making fun of it. Why? What are their motivations, and what do they gain from a generation of young people unprepared to do the kind of thinking a humanities degree offers?
Pretty sure it’s nothing good.
dailybridgerton
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