Why we need to study the Humanities

Maybe it has happened to you too. Someone has told you, "What a pity! Such a good student, such a sharp mind, such a talented person, and you're throwing it all to the dogs!" And why did you get that rebuke? Was it for something stupid you did? Was it for something morally reprehensible you did? Well, no. It was because you enrolled in a degree that many people despise. A humanities degree.

So now you're reading novels, and poems, and plays. So now you're looking at paintings and sculptures. So now you're reflecting upon Aristotle's ideas. So now you're learning a classical language. So now you're getting familiar with a foreign culture. WOW! You certainly are throwing your talents away, my dear. After all, it is universally acknowledged that language, culture, ideas, art and the whole lot ONLY make us humans. What's the point of studying IT?

Now, seriously: I am concerned about my students' self-esteem. Some are encouraged at home to do what they want to do and to follow their passion. But some have to endure their families' pressure, on a daily basis, because they are not doing something good enough. They probably mean, good enough to earn a decent living. Which is true. Humanities students rarely end up earning as much as first-division football players. Or as Wall Street brokers. Two groups that certainly earn decent wages. (Or don't they?) But if money is these families' greatest concern, I'd advise them not to underestimate the contribution of the cultural and creative industries to a country's economy. This link will provide them with some statistics and figures they might find worth reading:

Arts and Cultural Production Contributed $704.2 Billion to the U.S. Economy in 2013  National Endowment fot the Arts (February 16, 2016)

Then there's the question of whether one should let one's children study what they are good at, what inspires them, what makes them happy... or one should force them to accommodate to a pre-established design (for their own good, that goes without saying). Who wants to have a happy literature major in the family, or an enthusiastic linguist, or a passionate art historian, or a reflective philosopher... when you can have a mean lawyer, an unsympathetic doctor, a frustrated engineer, an unimaginative scientist or a miserable mathematician?  Or none of those, actually, because, let us not forget it, bored and unmotivated students often give up their degrees before completion.

So it turns out that humanities students can end up being happy, unbelievable as it may seem. And it also turns out that they can end up earning a decent living, though never as decent as that of first-division football players (that much we all agree upon). And, finally, it turns out that they can end up contributing a great deal to their countries, and not simply in terms of creative works, but in the evidently and obviously and unequivocally more important terms of MONEY.

So please, dear parents, neighbors and other well-meaning species who torture my students telling them they're wasting their time and throwing their talents to the dogs,




And read something. You may leave your technical manuals, drug handbooks, legal codes, or sports periodicals aside for a while... You've probably had enough of that, haven't you?

Now it's time for you to install new software into your own brains. 

(Otherwise you run the risk of passing a dangerous virus onto your children. And you don't want to do that, do you?)

This could be good for starters:

Why we still need to study the humanities in a STEM world