Problems in Humanities

The Effects of Humanities to the Students

According to the dictionary, Humanities are academic disciplines that study human culture. The humanities use methods that are primarily critical, or speculative, and have a significant historical element as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences. The basic understanding of the word humanities is the study of how human being live here on earth. However, if we look at deeply the significant things that we need to know and understand, it is how the human being lives on earth right from the very beginning of our existence.

Many has already changed and many things have evolved. The way of living from the past is totally different in the present. Nevertheless, the things that happened in the past have a connection in our present. Therefore, humanities can be described as the study of how people process and document the human experience. How does studying humanities affect the students? It has a big impact when we study humanities; it helps us know the world and it opens up our mind to appreciate the beauty of creation and the magnificence of the world. It helps us understand others through their languages, histories and cultures. It helps us develop our creativity and it helps us know the reason about being human. Most of all, it helps us realize the value of human life.

However, only a few of our generation today can appreciate the beauty of the ancient arts and the classical music. That is the dilemma that is being faced by our educators today. Ancient arts, cultures and philosophy are the foundation of all the different aspects of our life and we can only learn these things by looking back to our past experiences and learn from it. Thus, it is very significant to the student to study humanities to learn the different walks of life.

Humanities Will Endure

Pay attention to the serious talk around universities, read op-eds and publications and you might think the humanities were in greater risk than the earth’s environment. In fact, despite the overheated stated claims, the humanities are not at death’s door. Modern demands will more likely force them into a new shape, and eventually a healthier one. That claim might seem unusual. The percentage of scholars specializing in the humanities has sunk to an all-time low. Learners have turned their backs on art history and literary works in support of studies like bookkeeping and medical, that leads straight to jobs. Governors like Florida’s Rick Scott have proved helpful to undercut areas of study not tuned carefully to employment. President Obama wants education to stress technology, science, engineering and arithmetic. Resources for disciplines in professions like history and linguistics are drying up. The legislature has already reduced the budget of the National Endowment for the Humanities and now Rep. Paul Ryan wants to destroy it.

Analysts of higher education paint a more uncertain image. How many years ago you start counting either degrees or research dollars, determines how depressing the humanities figures look. And with more and more people in America going to college only to qualify themselves for work, most time-honored areas of study have taken a hit, not just the humanities. But even at a conventional, top level organization like Stanford, degrees in humanities professions have dropped so low as to alert teachers into unmatched missionary initiatives.

Whatever precise form changes takes, teachers and their learners are likely to find that the humanities amount to more than a set of separated professions, each stuck on its own island. Ordinary readers might find learned research in art, history and literary works regularly published in language available to them, even released in general-interest publications, as it usually was before 1850. Even political figures may look for the value of erudition efforts. Today’s many humanities jointly form the newest edition of a millennia-long European custom of query into language and its products: inquiry, that is, into worlds that humans have created for themselves and expressed in words. That endeavor will not vanish, even when the present humanities disciplines do.

Humanities Crisis

“Crisis” and “decline” are the terms of the day in conversations of the humanities. A primary stimulus for the issue is a stunning factoid: only 8% of undergraduates major in humanities. But this number is deceiving. It does not consist of degrees in carefully relevant areas such as history, literature and some of the social sciences. Nor does it take consideration of the many needed and optional humanities programs learners take outside their degrees. Most essential, the 8% contains only those with a serious educational interest in literary works, songs and art, not those dedicated to generating the creative works that humanists study.

Once we identify that deeply caring about the humanities (including the arts) does not need specializing in philosophy, English or foreign languages, it’s not at all apparent that there is a crisis of interest in the humanities, at least in our colleges. Is the crisis rather one of severe financial reality? Humanities degrees on average start making $31,000 per year and shift to a normal of $50,000 in their middle years. (The numbers for authors and executing performers are much reduced.) By comparison, company degrees begin with incomes 26% greater than humanities degrees and shift to incomes 51% greater.

But this information does not show that business degrees generate more because they majored in business. Business degrees may well be more enthusiastic about making profits and so agree to jobs that pay well even if they are not otherwise satisfying, whereas individuals enthusiastic about the humanities and the arts may be willing to take more satisfying but lower-paying jobs. Higher education teachers, for example, often know that they could have made far more if they had gone to law school or gotten an M.B.A., but are willing to agree to considerably reduced pay to teach a topic they enjoy.

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a story about dropping enrollments in the humanities professions. The information is a Harvard review about decreasing enrollments in the humanities; the point they drew is that humanities enrollments are crumbling because the degrees do not instantly offer themselves to post-graduate employment (never mind that the Harvard review makes it obvious that the actual competitors are with the social sciences, not the 1% of humanities-curious first-years who major in computer science).

But to really demonstrate a crisis, you need some figures. Associated with the story was a chart acknowledged to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences displaying an amazing failure in humanities enrollments. And although it shows up in the media regularly to implement a tale of corrosion, some wider viewpoints on the information make obvious that the “Humanities in crisis” tale is seriously embellished. First of all, the chart never quite supports the factor that something dreadful is going on in the humanities right now. Anyone looking carefully will observe, as Eileen Bérubé has, that the actual failure of humanities enrollments occurred in the 1970s. There is small lull in the Great Recession, but enrollments decreased more in the mid-1990s. Sure, a few Harvard degrees have turned from history to government in the last decade, but how much of that should any of us be distressed?

But even if the fall is old, it does succeed in making the humanities appear extremely out of date. If it is not decreasing, it is still past the time of importance. And that is a powerful story for all kinds of individuals. It makes humanists experience as though they are entitled to a bigger share of the school, and that some pathology in the lifestyle at large has them under stress. It allows more traditionalist experts of the humanities feel protected in declaring that something (deconstruction, multiculturalism, etc.) has toppled the areas from their regular position. And it indicates that anyone with an equation to “fix” the humanities can guarantee a comeback in more untroubled times.