There is a looming crisis in the field of Humanities.
A part of the problem in the field is so specialised, there are very few jobs that specifically will require someone with a particular humanities major. The best jobs are in government and teaching, but our government can't absorb all humanities graduates into every ministry that we have.
The second and bigger problem is that the humanities colleges in the West have been subverted by the political left. A student is not so much learning how to think critically and to develop a skill-set but to subvert capitalism and major institutions in Singapore. This is probably the other reason why the liberal arts have to go - let it fester and it will incubate a capitalist-hating fifth column in Singapore.
Without a doubt, people want a new way of looking at the humanities.
- What kind of critical thinking skills will allow us to compete in the age of machines?
- What kind of training can allow us to remain relevant when algorithms begin to run our lives?
Kevin Roose in his book Futureproof : 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automaton attempts to figure out what these Machine-age humanities will look like. I'm going to briefly list them here and I strongly recommend that readers take a quick look at this nascent attempt at machine-age humanities :
a) You must be able to guard your attention and invest your focus like an asset.
b) You should be able to read a room and modulate your behaviour according to what you read.
c) You should have a system to rest and recover from a strenuous work cycle.
d) You should have skills in digital discernment and be able to figure out whether there are commercial interests behind an article or whether the author is advocating for a cause and is thus biased.
e) You should develop social and emotional skills. What the author calls analogue ethics. The ability to act like a human being is becoming rarer as folks ghost each other on Tinder and prefer looking at their phones rather than having a conversation.
f) You should understand the consequences of new forms of technology. When a new technology is rolled out, it will instantly divide the population into haves and have-nots.
This list is likely incomplete. Right now I can imagine a software engineer levelling up with these skills and getting ahead of his peers, but I cannot imagine someone getting hired solely on developing expertise in this.
To succeed as a humanities grad, one has to be a polymath with the ability to learn new things fast & work with people and tasks outside of comfort zone e.g. gaining fluency in business accounting while being tasked with a major marketing campaign within 6 months on the job.
ReplyDeleteThat's why those who can make it earn higher salaries than most other majors. And it would appear that most of the humanities grads can make it.
Those who are self-absorbed and insist on a narrow interpretation of what type of job/ task is appropriate for their humanities training will find it hard to be accepted by many employers.