John Buttrick, who has a BA in English language and literature, writes from his Vermont Rocker in his Concord home: Minds Crossing. He can be reached at johndbuttrick@gmail.com.

The demand for science education is growing in high schools and perhaps even in lower grades. For example, the Monitor has recently posted advertisements for a science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) career fair. It is an event exclusively focused on the recruitment of high school math and science teachers. Other studies are of lesser importance and lesser value.

There are at least three reasons for this emphasis on STEM education. First, it prepares students to enter the job market or prepare for a career. Secondly, students applying to colleges are expected to show proficiency in the STEM curriculum. Third, people who are comfortable approaching life with absolute answers, find courses in history, literature, writing, social studies, and the arts contain too many variations within the content, and therefore lack trustworthiness and also may teach unacceptable ideas and indoctrinate.

Jay Tolson, Ed., The Hedgehog Review, spring 2023, explains “there is a spirit of subtlety in these (humanities) studies that objective seekers misunderstand.” They seek only sameness.

During the past decade, the study of English and history at the college level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, reports Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project. Humanities majors are perceived as failing to prepare students for good paying careers upon graduation.

Also, focusing education on the sciences is understood as necessary to keep the country innovative and competitive. The prosperity and influence of a country is measured by its technological prowess and advancements.

The third effect of the popularity of STEM is revealed in the debates over the content of English, history, sociology, and the arts in high school education. The Monitor reports (Few legal challenges to controversial laws,” Associated Press, Monitor, 3/21) that sixty-four laws have been passed across the country related to restrictions on what teachers can say and teach about race, racism, American history, gender identity, sexuality and LGBTQ+ issues. These laws of resistance are partly the result of a misunderstanding about the classroom discussions around these issues.

Math and sciences are structured around absolutes, (except for quantum theory). There is a dependable sameness — two plus two has the same answer tomorrow as it does today. However, literature, historical narratives, sociology, and the arts are more fluid. They include differing values, theories, conflicting systems and points of view to be learned and understood.

Some absolutists attempt to impose on humanities studies dependable sameness and right answers. They demand one particular “right” point of view. For example, one may choose, out of the content of history or gender identity, a white European set of values, practices, culture, economics, and a belief in the total righteousness of America. Any inclusion or discussion of alternatives is perceived as wrong and harmful. Divergent views are labeled misinformation, indoctrination, or manipulations using false theories.

The New Yorker reports a literature professor and critic at Harvard noticed that “it had become more publicly rewarding to critique something as ‘problematic’ than to grapple with what the problems might be; they seemed to have found that merely naming concerns had more value, in today’s cultural marketplace, than curiosity about what underlay them.”

Evidence of this tunnel vision, for example, is the demand to solve a problem by banning certain information. A Concord bookstore has a display of some banned books on subjects such as sexuality, racism, environmental studies, and historical accounts that include multiple points of view.

The solution to this confusion is not to censor content in humanities studies but to increase students’ exposure to more information. The solution may begin with attention to the lecture by Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California system, espousing a multiversity that incorporates something for everyone: skill sets in sciences as well as strengthening the liberal arts.

The value of liberal arts studies is in teaching critical thinking, stimulating imagination, increasing knowledge about and understanding of other peoples’ traditions and values. Exposure to more information gives the tools to make informed decisions. Literature enhances communication skills and critical thinking. History teaches the process of research, reasoning, and skills in discernment.

The goal of a liberal arts education is the cultivation of the mind, the belief that Lionel Trilling caricatured as “certain good things happen if we read literature.” Career studies have shown that humanities majors, with their communication and analytical skills, often end up in leadership jobs.

STEM courses are important in this era of artificial intelligence. However, the humanities — with its flood of knowledge, ideas, values, and choices — demonstrates a reality, outside of STEM, of continuing trustworthy theories that may, however, become obsolete in the future.

When young students experience that there is always more information, knowledge, and changing theories of the human condition to discover, the more comfortable they will be with the fluidity of thought in liberal arts. It will take a generation or two, but younger people will be freed from the need to cast all knowledge and information as one good way and all others as false and destructive of familiar preferable ways.

Imagine our schools becoming a model for the future where theories of government, ethics, economics, and human relationships are taken seriously, studied, debated, modified, and proven needed or no longer needed while new theories emerge – think political theories, race, racism, American history, the environment, gender identity, sexuality and LGBTQ+ issues among others.

Imagine it’s OK to have convictions without desecrating all others’. It is reason enough to support humanities studies in our high schools and colleges without fear or the need to censor. It would increase the health of the human condition. And remember, studies have shown that humanities majors, with their communication and analytical skills, often end up in leadership jobs.

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