Attitudes towards votech education [ATTN: Boyish-Tigerlilly]

[Netko]

This... isn't even an argument. This is saying "this is how it's been, therefore it's the right way".

I have no idea WTF he is on about. My university certainly had no requirement for any science or engineering students to take humanities students, nor did Leena's, and as far as we're aware this is true across Europe. Not sure about the rest of the world, but the forced humanities infection into useful subjects may well just be a US anomaly.

Well, we're into the whole Bologna process here, and we have a mandatory course per semester of a humanities/economics/law mix designed because the faculty saw that most of their graduates sooner or later wind up as managers . But it is preallocated to courses tailored for that (economics, communication, quality control, business law and so on) - and yes, they tend to be stupidly easy compared to the math, el. eng. or comp. sci. courses.

The previous programme had a mandatory student selecting humanities course and it was a total joke (most students, and keep in mind this is a EE and Comp. Sci. faculty, took comparative bible study because it was stupidly easy with only a short essay at the end needed to pass and no attendance requirement) and one of the first things axed in the new programme.

[aerius]

Here is the real reason why many science and math and so on don't like humanities. They know the world works by cronyism. They know that it's entirely possible that an English major or business major could end up being their boss. And they don't like it. They wish that the world worked by rewarding people with merit, regardless of who their friends were.

Speaking as a Computer Science graduate which in my university was in the Faculty of Engineering, it was nothing like that. We resent them because they whine & cry about having 15 hours of classes a week while we had roughly twice that. We resent them because they think their classes are so fucking hard, yet the average student from Engineering can go in cold and fucking ace their tests and papers. But what really pisses us off is how despite all that, they're still deluded enough to think they're as smart or smarter than us, and expect to be treated as intellectual equals despite the fact that they can't hold an intelligent conversation with us. It's like dealing with some high school dipshit who thinks he's special and knows everything, but who really knows jack shit. That's the real reason why us science & engineering types don't like the humanities clowns.

[brianeyci]

Well all I have to say is get better humanities friends. There are always whiners. There's whiners who don't speak English, particularly international students, who don't think that university should test you on reading and writing at all when they're studying math or science. They go into a humanities subject and can't write essays. It's not always a given that someone who does well in Calculus can do well in English, although it mostly is.

Don't worry, if humanities is worthless, they quickly find out as soon as they're done and are out pounding pavement. Talk to humanities students now and see if they're arrogant, the kinds who had trouble finding jobs and feel shafted from their very expensive education and their professors.

Some humanities students, year three and four, feel shame that they can't do Calculus. Ever hear "I was so bad at math in high school?" They wish they could, but they can't. That's not something to be angry at. That's something to feel sorry for, because when they come out they'll either have to use cronyism to get jobs (and if so why waste so much money) or they'll be homeless.

[Howedar]

This... isn't even an argument. This is saying "this is how it's been, therefore it's the right way".

No. It's saying, this is how it's been, therefore it's not the fault of the deluge of current humanities students coming in "infecting" science and mathematics and so on. If you want to say something is wrong, the burden of proof is on you.

Okay, that's not actually what you said, but I don't really care. Most of this thread, you know, has been supporting that burden of proof. You're two pages too late, buddy.

I'd make a crack about humanities procrastination just to piss you off, but nothing comes to mind.

[brianeyci]

Well Howedar, all I have to say is you seem to have latched onto one salient point, tradition, and ignored all the rest (which you quoted so I don't see how you could have missed it) which was really the crux of my argument. That is, you can take humanities related to science and technology, and my rebuttal of the argument that it's somehow a significant waste of money or time whose blame can be pinned on humanities, when it's the science faculty which demands their graduates take these electives.

I'd make a crack about science graduates looking at the small picture instead of the big picture, but nothing really comes to mind. By the way if you've been paying attention since page one, I was the one who brought up humanities procrastination, so it would hardly piss me off. I'm actually one of those hybrid freaks, half math half humanities.

[metavac]

Just an observation. This discussion looks like it's veering off into a debate over the justification behind the two- and four-year model of post-secondary school education.

[Starglider]

I'd make a crack about science graduates looking at the small picture instead of the big picture, but nothing really comes to mind.

Good for you, because any such crack would be amusingly pathetic given the total lack of comprehension of astronomy or cosmology of the average humanities student. And don't cry 'social context'. Excepting the more scientific bits of psychology (the bits that actually do repeatable experiments that can be objectively analyses), the humanities produce worthless ivory tower delusions in far greater quantity than genuine social insight.

[metavac]

How familiar are students in science/technical fields with humanistic subjects? How about even just the social sciences (i.e., psychology)?

[brianeyci]

I'd make a crack about science graduates looking at the small picture instead of the big picture, but nothing really comes to mind.

Good for you, because any such crack would be amusingly pathetic given the total lack of comprehension of astronomy or cosmology of the average humanities student. And don't cry 'social context'. Excepting the more scientific bits of psychology (the bits that actually do repeatable experiments that can be objectively analyses), the humanities produce worthless ivory tower delusions in far greater quantity than genuine social insight.

Actually, astronomy is one of the easier science courses humanities students take because it involves little mathematics. Humanities students fight to get into astronomy first year because they get A's in it while in Calculus they'd flunk.

Just what kind of humanities students do you guys hang around? Of course the morons will be the loudest, and at risk of sounding sexist the girls who look the hottest the dumbest. Try talking to the quiet shy ones. Maybe even the fat ones. If people take humanities to pick up hot women, guess what you get, bimbos.

[Darth Wong]

Don't worry, if humanities is worthless, they quickly find out as soon as they're done and are out pounding pavement.

The problem is not that humanities is "worthless"; the problem is threefold:

A) People don't understand what those educations actually give you. A popular artsie refrain when I was in school was "That's all right, that's OK, you're gonna work for us someday". That was actually a chant that artsies would shout at engineering and science people during frosh week. They all believe they're going to be high-flying executives telling us dumb-shit "actually know how to do something useful" people what to do. This conceit is partially due to the fact that so few of them understand the law of supply and demand.

B) A humanities education is billed as a self-contained "well-rounded" education, when it has narrowed numerous entire fields of knowledge completely out of its sphere and is therefore not "well-rounded" by definition. This would be merely a crime of arrogance and pride except that these people go on to teach, presuming that they actually are well-rounded enough to teach any subject from english to physics and math. The fact is that most of the teachers you will see in any given public school are the people who hated math when they went to school, and didn't do very well at it.

C) The overselling of humanities educations have driven people away from a diverse array of educational specializations that are actually much more useful to society. These are people who obviously lack the particular aptitudes they need in order to become professionals like doctors or scientists or engineers, and who might be quite well-suited to a skilled trade if decades of humanities propaganda had not soured them on that concept without even considering it first.

Talk to humanities students now and see if they're arrogant, the kinds who had trouble finding jobs and feel shafted from their very expensive education and their professors.

Figuring out that you got ripped off after 4th year is 4 years too late. There's a place for the humanities, but it should be a fairly small place. The world has always needed far more wrench-turners and weed-pullers than artisans and philosophers, and that equation does not change just because we live in the 21st century. The fact that we have gotten so far away from that will someday be regarded by historians as proof that our society had grown "decadent" and ripe for collapse.

Some humanities students, year three and four, feel shame that they can't do Calculus. Ever hear "I was so bad at math in high school?" They wish they could, but they can't.

And yet they still look down on the wrench-turners and weed-pullers, don't they?

[kheegster]

How familiar are students in science/technical fields with humanistic subjects? How about even just the social sciences (i.e., psychology)?

When I talk to humanities grad students, I find it a lot easier for them to tell me about their studies ( e.g. modern Middle-Eastern history, 16th century French literature) then it is for me to tell them about my work (e.g. accretion hydrodynamics in the early universe).

It's far easier for a 'layperson' to get a feel for topics like history and politics simply by reading widely enough in their own time, since there are far less technical prerequisites required to understand most humanities subjects compared to science/technology. Even with more dense subjects like philosophy, I just need to read a couple of books on the subject in order to bring me up to the level taught at undergrad classes.

I've met many people who have made the transition from science/engineering into humanities, but rarely a case of the opposite transition (with the notable exception of Ed Witten).

Actually, astronomy is one of the easier science courses humanities students take because it involves little mathematics. Humanities students fight to get into astronomy first year because they get A's in it while in Calculus they'd flunk.

I must defend my field here . The findings of astronomy do not require much maths to describe, but the methodology certainly involves a lot of maths and statistics. I can tell you that Cepheid variables are pulsating stars whose luminosity is correlated with its pulsation period, but I can't begin to describe them properly without thermodynamics, PDEs and perturbation theory.

[brianeyci]

"That's all right, that's OK, you're gonna work for us someday"

They still say that Mike. Exactly those words. I was on the humanities side of Trinity College, too drunk to say anything watching people moon each other. The engineers brought their cannon right into our quad and fired it off waking up the entire college. We rushed out to see engineers armed to the teeth with whistles and noisemakers. Lucky it didn't turn into a brawl, half of us were drunk.

I thought it was funny, but didn't actually know what to make of it. Four years later... yeah, I wish I had been on the engineers side .

The main goal was to steal a hardhat. Anybody who stole one was a god, since the engineers guarded them with their lives. You still have yours?

And yet they still look down on the wrench-turners and weed-pullers, don't they?

I guess they do. Yeah, it sucks. I would say that almost as much if not more comes from the weed and wrench turners themselves though, like Stark mentioned. Weed and wrench turners don't want to associate themselves with any kind of academic or professional status at all and want to be viewed as down to earth.

I guess the criticism of humanities students is valid. All I ask is show understanding to those who are not arrogant and who are not full of themselves. You might be surprised how many they are, who scramble after realizing their English is worthless and have to attend remedial education in business school or technical school.

The real fault is the high schools, not the universities, and certainly not the students themselves who will have to suffer enough. You know you only need Grade 9 science to get a high school diploma? Grade 9 math too. Basically exponent laws and adding and balancing equations and using a calculator. The damage is already done, far too late by university.

[brianeyci]

I must defend my field here

Who am I to argue with you? Weren't you the guy who got offers from MIT, Princeton, Harvard etc.? You surviving ok, I hope you figured out how to take a bath.

All I was saying was astronomy one hundred, the kind humanities majors take to fill their science requirement. The point has already been made, that many humanities can survive a statistics, and even basic Calculus, the kind that commerce take.

[Spin Echo]

I've met many people who have made the transition from science/engineering into humanities, but rarely a case of the opposite transition (with the notable exception of Ed Witten).

I can't believe you forgot Hale Bradt

[metavac]

When I talk to humanities grad students, I find it a lot easier for them to tell me about their studies ( e.g. modern Middle-Eastern history, 16th century French literature) then it is for me to tell them about my work (e.g. accretion hydrodynamics in the early universe).

I've had the same experience, but then again we're only talking about the results of our work. I can get lost in a discussion about content analysis almost as easily as they could in a talk about symmetry transformation, even though we both can define these penetrating ideas in terms that while not useful for tool work still get the concept across. I can get the drift of what drama students mean by method acting, but I can't emulate it. They might understand what an integral and a derivative do, but they can't apply them. In my experience, the key difference has always boiled down to hours spent working; the clock noticeably favor the humanities. Still, we all do tedious work--whether solving and crunching equations, writing essays, machining parts for a Stirling engine, or putting in a 1,000 plus hours in the kitchen--in order to perform a job more competently than the layperson.

It's far easier for a 'layperson' to get a feel for topics like history and politics simply by reading widely enough in their own time, since there are far less technical prerequisites required to understand most humanities subjects compared to science/technology. Even with more dense subjects like philosophy, I just need to read a couple of books on the subject in order to bring me up to the level taught at undergrad classes. I've met many people who have made the transition from science/engineering into humanities, but rarely a case of the opposite transition (with the notable exception of Ed Witten).

My gut goes with you, only because I've heard so much testimony from scientists and engineers who claimed they basically breezed through undergraduate humanities coursework and still got top notch grades. Like you, I've only rarely heard of the opposite. I have no stories of English majors casually flipping through calc textbooks and bragging about acing their problem sets and exams. But I'm still stuck with only anecdotes, and even then I have to consider competing hypotheses for the disparity. Is it because math is so daunting or is it because humanities is more appealing? And as more and more humanistic topics cross over into the world of science, I still wonder if the qualitative methods of history, literature and the arts are truly less unwieldy than the tools I've picked up in math.

[metavac]

I've met many people who have made the transition from science/engineering into humanities, but rarely a case of the opposite transition (with the notable exception of Ed Witten).

I can't believe you forgot Hale Bradt

Good call, man. BA in Music from Princeton to Ph.D in Physics from MIT.

[Darth Wong]

I've met many people who have made the transition from science/engineering into humanities, but rarely a case of the opposite transition (with the notable exception of Ed Witten).

I can't believe you forgot Hale Bradt

Good call, man. BA in Music from Princeton to Ph.D in Physics from MIT.

The fact that such ability is enough to make you internationally noteworthy says it all. The ability to jump the fence and do well in the other direction is so common that it doesn't merit even a footnote in the back pages of any newspaper.

[Darth Wong]

Is it because math is so daunting or is it because humanities is more appealing?

Oh come on, you honestly don't see why math is intrinsically more difficult? Mathematics does not come naturally to humans. Social interaction and the study of social interactions, on the other hand, is so natural that people do it in their leisure time. No reasonable person can deny that math is more daunting to the vast majority of people.

PS. Or to put it another way, what person would enroll in an English lit course and seriously be afraid of flunking the course even if he tries his best? Be honest; nobody would. It's almost impossible to flunk an English lit course. But a calculus course? That's a whole different story; this board undoubtedly has many people who, if forced to take a calculus course, would seriously fear that they could not possibly pass, no matter how hard they try.

[metavac]

Is it because math is so daunting or is it because humanities is more appealing?

Oh come on, you honestly don't see why math is intrinsically more difficult? Mathematics does not come naturally to humans. Social interaction and the study of social interactions, on the other hand, is so natural that people do it in their leisure time. No reasonable person can deny that math is more daunting to the vast majority of people.

As tempting as it is to agree, I have to consider the 30 year trend in SAT scores. On the other hand, retention in engineering programs is more sensitive to the SAT Math score than the university-wide rate (Table 2).

[Howedar]

You dipshit, it doesn't occur to you that SAT scores, even if they were perfect measures of competence, are not absolute measures that can be compared across disciplines?

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

I know I can't pass calculus. It's not really even a maybe. I don't have the prerequisite information to do that, since I was only really "allowed" to go up to Algebra II in highschool.

I find it that the information I did learn, I forgot much of, since I almost never use it. That's also a problem.

But by now it's basically impossible to go back and do it all over again.

[metavac]

PS. Or to put it another way, what person would enroll in an English lit course and seriously be afraid of flunking the course even if he tries his best? Be honest; nobody would. It's almost impossible to flunk an English lit course. But a calculus course? That's a whole different story; this board undoubtedly has many people who, if forced to take a calculus course, would seriously fear that they could not possibly pass, no matter how hard they try.

I struggled with English romantic fiction course. We spent the semester mired in thirteen works and biweekly written responses on top of three research papers. I wasn't comfortable at all content analysis until close to the end, and you spent a lot of time in library or on citebases scouring for pertinent criticism and circumstances contemporary to a given work. The experience wasn't anywhere close to flipping through a book and giving your superficial impressions of it. That's not to say I had greater difficulty in my humanities courses than my math ones--I didn't. But in the end it's all I have, a personal experience that hinted at something less accessible than I could reach with the tools I had. We should at least see if some actual research bears one view out over the other.

[metavac]

You dipshit, it doesn't occur to you that SAT scores, even if they were perfect measures of competence, are not absolute measures that can be compared across disciplines?

If you take a minute to read, you might notice that Mike argued that math is intrinsically less intuitive to people than humanities. If that were true, you'd expect that at some acceptable level of proficiency average verbal scores on the SAT would be higher than math scores. They aren't. The remaining criticism of my approach is that the SAT average scores are too low to predict success in collegiate math, science and engineering programs (and I provided a link to a study supporting that criticism).

[Spin Echo]

You dipshit, it doesn't occur to you that SAT scores, even if they were perfect measures of competence, are not absolute measures that can be compared across disciplines?

If you take a minute to read, you might notice that Mike argued that math is intrinsically less intuitive to people than humanities. If that were true, you'd expect that at some acceptable level of proficiency average verbal scores on the SAT would be higher than math scores. They aren't. The remaining criticism of my approach is that the SAT average scores are too low to predict success in collegiate math, science and engineering programs (and I provided a link to a study supporting that criticism).

The problem with that assumption is that the SAT is designed so that the average score for each of the sections is around 500.

[SirNitram]

This has to be some kind of joke. An English Romantic course gave Meta trouble, so all Humanities are now somehow as difficult as Calculus and various science courses? Talk about extrapolating your own experiences into the world based on sheer fucking arrogance... Hell, my Philosophy course was as easy as hell once I could remember the names, and the paper was a breeze. Fuck, I added a Shakespearian course for fun!

Don't throw around horseshit here.