STEM degrees are great, but humanities feel like black sheep

More and more lately, secondary education has been leaning towards STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) content. Even though the humanities field seems to have fallen out of the national focus, even if it’s not the foundation of our education system, the two disciplines definitely work best in conjunction.

Maybe we’re being a little melodramatic, and it should be noted that the Advocate staff has a pretty clear pre-existing bias, since we’re pretty deeply rooted in the humanities. While any growth in education is typically a good thing, most humanities students have been walking around for years now with a bitter taste in their mouth, knowing that at the end of their education they could still just end up an overqualified barista. Joining the flock of business students who are only there on campus to get an “actual” job is looking better and better by the day.

And for good reason: Science is great at giving quantitative answers. Where it’s not so great is filling in the gaps. To put it crudely, science tells us how stuff works, but it does nothing to tell us why it’s there. Simply: why is there stuff, as opposed to not stuff?

The two go hand-in-hand, really. Knowledge without character ultimately builds up to war, and if we all had character but no knowledge we would probably starve. It makes no sense to divide the two, even from a strictly productive standpoint: Workplaces want employees that are both creative and efficient. Why build anything, without first asking ourselves why we’re doing it?