a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
mk  ·  1780 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Academic Apocalypse: The crisis of English departments is also a crisis of faith.

    Define "humanities"

Contemplating/consuming descriptions/expressions of the human experience.

    and explain why they should be a significant part of any higher education.

They give our thoughts the context of other's thoughts. Those thoughts that have resonated for some reason or other usually reveal something about the human experience, or at least about it at a particular time. This helps us pattern match, distinguish tread-ground from frontier, measure our own thoughts, our values and ethics, our interactions, and more.

    Without maxims or assumptions, explain the value of "humanities."

I don't know if that's possible. That might be a feature, not a bug.