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We Need More Polymaths
Emphasizing the humanities and the liberal arts can help
Western culture has entered the era of hyperspecialization and birthed a generation of highly educated yet pragmatically inept young people. Academia prides itself on its ever-increasing emphasis on STEM topics at the expense of traditional liberal arts and humanities studies. Young people today can whip up brilliant computer code in record time and spew esoteric rhetoric about whether Cas9 or Cas13 is better suited for their CRISPR experiment, which aims to increase the forehead size of the fruit fly. These skills superficially jive with the demands of the corporate oligarchy under which we currently live; and yet, many of today’s “educated” young people are miserable. They scarf down anxiety medications or booze just to sleep under the burden of their student loans and the fear of their prospects of a mediocre life. They feel alone, lost, trampled upon, and hopeless; they feel like their laser-focused education has been all for naught because now what they studied has become obsolete since they don’t know what a blockchain is. How can it be that we’ve let ourselves get to this point? The answer is surely multifactorial, but undoubtedly includes a failure of older generations to instill the importance of the humanities in younger folks.
