moltenmetal said:
As far as the idea that engineers need to take arts and humanities courses to become "well rounded citizens", I think it's a naïve concept at best
I never said that, nor was I trying to imply it. My point was that those that take humanities should not be treated with the level of disdain that is ever present here and in society at large. Their education holds great value to our society due to the critical yet creative thought process that comes from it.
That being said, I’m not in full support of your argument. I do agree that critical thinkers can be developed without needing formal education in the humanities. However, that is dependent on the persons family and social circles. The majority of kids inherent their world views from their parents; they tend to share the same political affinity, religious practices and level of skepticism. There are, of course, exceptions but they are just that – exceptions. It is therefore important, to me at least, that people receive some amount of formal education in subjects such as critiquing arguments, logic, philosophy of thought, ethics, etc. I would also continue to defend that exposure to the arts is important, not just for developing the creative side of people but for the enrichment it offers. I would agree,
partly, that this should be done during primary school rather than university.
I believe that the primary role of standardized education, and by that I mean primary level, state-supported education, is to develop a citizenry that can act in its own best interest, not the best interest of the state/those in power. To achieve this, you need to develop critical, creative, skeptical thinkers. The focus should be on developing the thought process, not the capacity to regurgitate answers. The former creates an empowered, effective citizenry, the latter creates drones. There is an obvious benefit to those in power (both politically and economically – if there is any difference between the two left) to create the latter but I believe the systemic issues are more to do with incompetence than malevolence.
I should stress the “partly” bolded above because I feel that the whole argument that the requirement for humanities is “watering-down” technical degrees is just BS from corporations who don’t want to spend a dime on actually training people. I guarantee you that most, if not all, people on this forum only use a handful of classes on a day-to-day basis. I took at least 4 classes on stress analysis but my job does not require me to know it. Heck, I took an aerospace option at school but ended up not working in the aerospace field. Meanwhile, two of my mandatory humanities, Philosophy 101: Critical Thinking and English 101, I use on a day-to-day basis. Furthermore, my ethics class, which was in the Department of Anthropology (historical view of human/technological relations), has allowed me to be a better engineer at my company than my Air and Spacecraft Performance and Design class. So to say that humanities are a waste of time is just not true because you cannot even say that a humanities class is going to be less important than a given technical class.
Engineering and its sub-disciplines are far too broad to tailor the education to any specific job. Frankly, it is impossible for universities to pre-train students for their job as neither knows what that will be. Instead, it is about developing a tool-box of knowledge to draw from; a critical and creative thought process is a huge part of that.
