Ask any high school student what their favorite subject is, and unfortunately, they probably won’t say language. Probably not history. And most definitely not English.

To be fair, everyone knows that lunch is objectively the best subject (if you’re not taking AP Lunch then shame on you), but after that, science and math reign supreme.

The humanities have become the Michael Scott of academics; everyone hates him, but if they truly got to know him for who he really was, then they’d realize he’s not such a bad guy.

Both the modern job climate and popular culture have ostracized the humanities as something to be avoided at all costs. Being an English or History major gets you looked down upon by your family when there other areas of study are much more ‘practical’ like engineering or biology.

This is something I have struggled with. I vastly prefer studying open-ended topics over objective fields, but it feels as though I would be condemning myself to jobless-ness by doing so.

When former president Barack Obama jokes about an art history degree being less valuable than a technical one, it’s clear that our culture supports an agenda of ending the humanities.

Not only is this disappointing, but it’s also a frightening prospect to consider. For as much as we can joke about the pointlessness of studying literature, there are dangerous consequences to the idea that the humanities don’t matter.

It’s for this reason that I made this defense of the humanities and what changes should be made in a humanities education.

The humanities are what distinguish human beings from dogs or cats or the robots that will inevitably take over the world; the humanities encompass the human experience, portraying art, emotions, thoughts, and history.

Any calculator can do math, but can it interpret the purpose of those operations? Any animal has instincts, but can they portray those instincts through art or critically think about them? This is why the humanities are valuable; they make us human, interesting people that don’t just act, but act with reason.

So what point is there to studying the humanities? Well, each endeavor within the humanities serves to make us more human than we were before as our thinking becomes more analytical and our reasoning sharper.

The humanities should have a multiplicative effect, enhancing all that we do through the emotion and thought behind the act.

This has real importance in STEM fields because, believe it or not, there’s a real need for an ethical inquiry within technological advancements.

The objective-based mindset of STEM does lead to new developments, like artificial intelligence and increasingly advanced weaponry, but without seriously considering the ethics of the tech, this can make the progression seem more like a regression.

To quote Jeff Goldblum’s character from Jurassic Park, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

The humanities develop the critical thinking skills that are key to our increasingly tech-driven world. Jurassic Park is fiction, but our technology is rapidly approaching science fiction levels as it is.

Companies are developing video software with artificial human dialogue that will soon be indistinguishable from an actual human speaking. A speech from the president will soon be impossible to tell if it’s real or not.

And they say fake news is a problem now.

I realize this is a drastic conclusion to draw from a seemingly simple issue, but with such denouncement of the humanities, that’s the implication.

I’m not suggesting that science should be done away with altogether, nor do I think we should spend years analyzing prose just for the sake of it.

To start, our education system needs to move past the simply reductive elements of humanities education that cause students to hate it in the first place.

I suspect that so many students hate English because they encounter such strange teaching methods. To clarify, I do have the utmost respect for the English, History, and MCL departments of this school, and I’m sure there is purpose behind most of what teachers do.

But it’s no wonder why a student would hate their class if their teacher asks ridiculous tasks of them, like writing reductively on what “the meaning” or “the theme” of a book is when there’s much more interesting conversations to be had.

I would hope that the departments also look beyond simple test scores and grades as those are simply inadequate forms of measuring a student’s progress in the humanities.

That’s where the problem STEMs from.