One of the reasons that funding for the humanities is disappearing (along with courses, college majors, extracurricular activities, etc.) is that we’re in an educational model right now tied to “pathways.” If you’re a higher ed professional, you’ve probably heard the word “pathways” so many times in the past few years that it has become like nails on a chalkboard. It’s one of those buzzwords that gets crammed into every initiative, every proposal, every attempt to beg for funding.
What does “pathways” mean? Well, it’s the idea that college tracks should map directly onto specific career paths. The problem with the pathways model is that it tends to hyperfocus attention onto those specific careers while ignoring the holistic purpose of a quality education. Yes, an education will (hopefully) lead to a successful career someday, but education isn’t the same as job training.
Apprenticeship programs, technical schools, and specific career certificates have traditionally filled that role, and it seems like now those separate educational paths may be merging. Ultimately, this has an impact on education all the way down to preschool. When we start thinking about the goal of education only in terms of the possible career one wants to attain at the end, we shut down a lot of important aspects. In particular, we shut down the humanities.
See, it’s hard to explain what the humanities do in terms of specific careers. Most of our careers directly feed back into education, which (when the question is what can you do with this degree) becomes a bit dubious. What career will you go into? Well, teaching other people about this topic. What career will they go into, then?
The answer, of course, is every career, but that’s not the one that a pathways-minded administrator wants to hear. It sounds like we’re justifying our own existence to save our paychecks rather than actually contributing to the economy.
I think there are plenty of non-economic arguments for studying the humanities (and I’ll be exploring them on this blog as well), but today I want to tackle this question at face value. What is the economic benefit of studying the humanities if you have no intention of making a career out of the humanities? What good does it do to study history if you plan to be an accountant? Why do you need to read Shakespeare if you’re going to start your own software business?
To answer this question, I refer you to this podcast from one of my favorite shows, How I Built This. Each episode features an interview with an entrepreneur about how they started their business. This particular episode interviews Gary Hirshberg, the founder of Stonyfield Yogurt. The whole episode is very engaging because Hirshberg almost lost his business multiple times, and I love the tale of success coming back from the brink of failure. But the part I want to focus on right now is Hirshberg’s discussion of his college education. See, this wildly successful businessman didn’t get a traditional business education. In fact, he didn’t get a traditional education at all.
Hirshberg had grown up watching his father toil away as a shoe business owner, and he associated business work with misery and disappointment. As a result, he chose an “overtly liberal arts, non-business environment” by attending Hampshire College. It’s an almost aggressively non-business school, but Hirshberg says it was “probably the best training for an entrepreneur that there is.” He explains that the school had “no credits, no requirements, no grades.” Students instead contract with individual professors in an apprentice model for each subject studied. While Hirshberg still hated business, his research in environmentalism and ecology kept coming back to industry and the understanding of how our economic pursuits impacted our sustainable ecological practices. He credits this unusual educational approach with giving him the tools to think critically, dig deeply, and ultimately come out with the passion and skills necessary to start his business.
Though he doesn’t use the word “humanities,” Hirshberg’s non-traditional liberal arts training was steeped in humanities principles, and he points to the thing that the humanities do better than other areas of study. They allow their participants to draw connections and approach things from multiple perspectives. The humanities encourage deep learning and multifaceted understanding. This is why tech companies keep seeking out humanities majors. They know that they are getting critical thinkers who can solve novel problems.
Hearing Hirshberg speak about his transformation from someone who hated the idea of going into business to a successful businessman who continued to fight for his company against all odds made me think of a book I read recently. Drive by Daniel Pink examines what motivates people, and he theorizes that our traditional model of rewards and punishments has it all wrong. People, Pink explains, aren’t motivated by external factors like paychecks and gold stars. They are instead motivated intrinsically by their natural curiosity and drive to understand the world. Here’s a good 10-minute summary of the book’s main findings:
Carrots and sticks only work as motivators when the task is purely mechanical. Once creativity and cognitive skill are involved, the three qualities of motivation are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. In other words, people who are going to be doing complicated, self-motivated tasks need to feel engaged with them in order to be motivated to do them well. He ends by saying that if we want to be successful, we need to throw out old business models and instead “start treating people like people.”
Do you know where you learn to treat people like people? Of course! In the humanities!
We are heading into a new frontier of economic, labor, and business influences. Fewer and fewer jobs will require simple mechanical tasks because those tasks will instead be replaced by machines that don’t need bathroom breaks, don’t call in sick, and don’t slow down because they broke up with their girlfriend the night before and are lost in their feelings. In other words, machines are better at being machines than people are.
But people are still better at being people, so that’s where the future of work is going to be. The jobs of the future are going to be those that require creativity, flexibility, and innovation. There will be new problems to solve and new ethical frameworks to build.
In every industry–from determining how to program self-driving cars in case of an accident to deciding what to do with data from biometric screenings to figuring out how to sell shoes–the people who are given the room to be autonomous, given the chance to master skills, and shown a purpose for their work are the ones who are going to rise to the top.
And the humanities offer us master classes in all of those things because the humanities are rooted in what it means to be human.
Images: Peter Whiddon, Jocelyn Wallace
