Do We Need to Rescue the Humanities?
Setup
Is America turning its back on the humanities? The evidence seems real when we see declining enrollments in the studies of arts, history, literature, language, and philosophy at colleges and universities across the country. Declining enrollments preface limited budgets for broad areas of inquiry as the promise of STEM curricula woos students to jobs and career paths. Is this a crisis in our culture? This conversation will explore the dilemma. Can the humanities survive and flourish in an age of reverence for technology and quantification? Are practicality and best practices all a society needs? Can we prepare our citizens for democracy absent an appreciation of history and the ideas that shape it? Has ever a decent and rational society come into being without humanistic habits of reflection? How do we reinstate the humanities at the heart of our conception of an educated person?
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