Obsessing about STEM: America seems entranced by STEM education, at the expense of our future, which requires more agile ways of thinkings that the humanities and liberal arts provide. "The United States has led the world in economic dynamism, innovation and entrepreneurship thanks to exactly the kind of teaching we are now told to defenestrate. A [...]
Why read the classics: Italo Calvino (1923-1985) explains the nature of a classical literary composition, which has various means of speaking to us throughout the different times of our lives. If the books have remained the same (even though they too change in light of a different historical perspective), we ourselves have certainly changed, and the encounter [...]
The clarion call for STEM: state legislatures and politicians -- from both parties -- stress education in the sciences, rather than in the humanities and arts: taxpayers should subsidize, the argument goes, those courses of study most likely to produce better taxpayers. "When it comes to dividing the pot of money devoted to higher education, [...]
Do we need a calendar for the season of love?
The liberal arts include the sciences, and the sciences make use of the approaches the humanities bring to observation and inquiry. The author writes: The idea that STEM is something separate and different than the liberal arts is damaging to both the sciences and their sister disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The value of a liberal [...]
Umberto Eco explains how books, as our familial elders, deepen our emotional lives across generations. Valentino Bompiani once circulated a saying: “one person who reads is worth two.” It was said by a publisher probably as a clever slogan, but I think it means that writing (and in general language) lengthen one’s life. From the time when [...]
The ways engineering, in order to succeed, requires training in the humanities (for example, Russian literature) and vice versa!
Thoughts of Frederick Douglass on finding the trajectory of moral and social justice in the course of history. There is, in the world's government, a force which has in all ages been recognized, sometimes as Nemesis, sometimes as the judgment of God and sometimes as retributive justice; but under whatever name, all history attests the [...]
The President of the New York Institute of Technology explains why the humanities are vital for scientific and medical inquiry.
George Washington, at the close of the Revolution, imagines the nation in concert with philosophers and lawgivers, who foster letters, commerce, and well-being. The Citizens of America, placed in the most enviable condition, as the sole Lords and Proprietors of a vast Tract of Continent, comprehending all the various soils and climates of the World, [...]
