I was in STEM and the majority of my classmates didn't only avoid humanities courses, but outright hated the idea of humanities courses. They thought they were useless and beneath them. I think that's how you get incredibly reactionary engineers.
Part of that is the sort of conflicting goals in education.
Traditionally, university was about producing the Rennissance Man. It was mostly a product for the elite, and it made sense to be teaching them Latin and Shakespeare, so they could have stuffy drawing-room conversations with other elites.
In recent years, education is much more about acquiring a credential to unlock a higher paid job. The people attending are never getting into a drawing-room conversation, so the time spent on Latin and Shakespeare merely increases the cost of the programme, the time to completion, and the risk you end up with a lower GPA that looks questionable on a resume. I can see the recalctriance. I had that recalctriance (on a scholarship with a finite term and GPA requirements, I'm not going to expose myself to cost and risk for the sake of being a more interesting person)
I always figured the way to address this was to provide more open-entry, non-graded courses in the humanities. Normalize taking a week-long evening class instead of binge watching a TV series. Right now, the closest we have tends to be either audit-only programmes at existing universities (complicated and expensive, and the content may be intended more for mainstream students, so you might be missing prerequisite knowledge if you try to jump into a random senior-level course) or Learning Annex sort of stuff which is likely to be of low quality and spotty selection.
Normalize taking a week-long evening class instead of binge watching a TV series.
I would honestly love to do this. I would love it if modern life provided more free time so I'd have the energy to do it. And obviously I wish it was more affordable to do this. And that there were structures to do it outside of being "certified" (aka no testing, it's literally just an avenue to learn about things).
One of the most left wing professors I had was some older guy who was just constantly taking classes and such, even though he was in his late 60's (at least)
Yeah, I did both a science and a humanities degree and he differences between the students was always really stark. My STEM classmates not only disliked the humanities classes, they were openly hostile towards philosophy and literature as concepts. Nearly all of them had a conception that anything that happened before they were born wasn't worth knowing. They had no interest in culture, were unaware of stuff like landmark movies or novels. It was hard to relate to them. Some of the STEM classmates were cool, but they were the ones most likely to stay in academia forever. They were actually interested in numbers and science, and didn't simply see knowledge as some instrument to become middle class.
I never met the opposite, a humanities student outright hostile to science itself, except for one very weird Foucault acolyte. Most of the time they'd just say they're bad at math, which is fair. I'm pretty bad at math too.
I was in STEM and the majority of my classmates didn't only avoid humanities courses, but outright hated the idea of humanities courses. They thought they were useless and beneath them. I think that's how you get incredibly reactionary engineers.
Part of that is the sort of conflicting goals in education.
Traditionally, university was about producing the Rennissance Man. It was mostly a product for the elite, and it made sense to be teaching them Latin and Shakespeare, so they could have stuffy drawing-room conversations with other elites.
In recent years, education is much more about acquiring a credential to unlock a higher paid job. The people attending are never getting into a drawing-room conversation, so the time spent on Latin and Shakespeare merely increases the cost of the programme, the time to completion, and the risk you end up with a lower GPA that looks questionable on a resume. I can see the recalctriance. I had that recalctriance (on a scholarship with a finite term and GPA requirements, I'm not going to expose myself to cost and risk for the sake of being a more interesting person)
I always figured the way to address this was to provide more open-entry, non-graded courses in the humanities. Normalize taking a week-long evening class instead of binge watching a TV series. Right now, the closest we have tends to be either audit-only programmes at existing universities (complicated and expensive, and the content may be intended more for mainstream students, so you might be missing prerequisite knowledge if you try to jump into a random senior-level course) or Learning Annex sort of stuff which is likely to be of low quality and spotty selection.
I would honestly love to do this. I would love it if modern life provided more free time so I'd have the energy to do it. And obviously I wish it was more affordable to do this. And that there were structures to do it outside of being "certified" (aka no testing, it's literally just an avenue to learn about things).
One of the most left wing professors I had was some older guy who was just constantly taking classes and such, even though he was in his late 60's (at least)
Yeah, I did both a science and a humanities degree and he differences between the students was always really stark. My STEM classmates not only disliked the humanities classes, they were openly hostile towards philosophy and literature as concepts. Nearly all of them had a conception that anything that happened before they were born wasn't worth knowing. They had no interest in culture, were unaware of stuff like landmark movies or novels. It was hard to relate to them. Some of the STEM classmates were cool, but they were the ones most likely to stay in academia forever. They were actually interested in numbers and science, and didn't simply see knowledge as some instrument to become middle class.
I never met the opposite, a humanities student outright hostile to science itself, except for one very weird Foucault acolyte. Most of the time they'd just say they're bad at math, which is fair. I'm pretty bad at math too.
They were big mad when my university was like "you need one unit per year from outside your discipline".
Shit's annoying, i don't need my inability to write papers exposed on my transcripts
That's like an intellectual version of being told to touch grass, it makes so much sense now