In Defense of Humanities

With rising tuition costs and an extremely competitive job market, today's college students hesitate to pursue any course of study that might not end in lucrative job prospects. As an English major, I constantly get questioned about the wisdom of my degree. I've listened to more than a few jabs about working in a coffee shop the rest of my life. Never mind the fact that I'm already supporting myself with a thriving freelance career; I'm an English major, so by definition, I am inferior to all those business and engineering students.

This debate has gone on for a long time, but it recently picked up steam after Florida Governor Rick Scott made some snarky comments about anthropology students, despite the fact that his own daughter majored in anthropology. The governor feels that students should not be encouraged to pursue the humanities, because they are not of "vital interest" to the state of Florida. In his humanities-bashing speech, he said, "[Anthropology is] a great degree if people want to get it. But we don't need them here."

The other day, I was looking through a list of great quotes, when I came across the following gem:

"It is not enough to teach a man a specialty. Through it he may become a kind of useful machine, but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and a lively feeling for values. He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good.....He must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions and their sufferings, in order to acquire a proper relationship to individual fellow men and to the community. These precious things are conveyed to the younger generation through personal contact with those who teach, not--or at least not in the main--through text books. It is this that primarily constitutes and preserves culture. This is what I have in mind when I recommend the "humanities" as important, not just dry specialized knowledge in the fields of history and philosophy. Overemphasis on the competitive syste m and premature specialization on the ground of immediate usefulness kill the spirit on which all cultural life depends, specialized knowledge included."

-Albert Einstein


I think that Einstein was spot on in his assessment of the humanities. Not everybody is cut out to study anthropology, but that does not mean it should be eliminated.