Took it out of my mouth 
I agree and Iâd add that they need math too. Without a sufficient understanding of underlying math and probabilities, they may be more prone to misinterpret or misuse statistics.
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This is where I think colleges that require âx years of high school language studyâ in order to be a competitive applicant are misguided. I know so many children of immigrants who are taking Spanish 1-4 in high school while neglecting and forgetting their heritage Arabic or Farsi or Ukrainian because colleges wonât accept self-study of a heritage language in place of formal classroom study of a language.
So my idea for âHow can the Humanities evolve to remain relevantâ is for colleges to require applicants to either have 4 years of high school foreign language or to pass a proficiency test in a heritage language. Because right now, immigrant families are getting the message that their home languages arenât worth @#%$^ to colleges.
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Jeez, do I really have to qualify everything I say? When I say people go to college to get a piece of paper that says theyâre qualified to enter the workforce, I mean thatâs generally why people go to college. Iâm not being literal.
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Depends on the college⊠California public universities only care about the level of skill attained in terms of frosh admission requirements in language other than English (although proof of skill attained in a less common language may be harder to obtain for a heritage speaker who grew up in the US).
Yes, this is the way I think more colleges should operate in order to stay relevant!
I have heard the argument that what demonstrates ârigorâ is taking the high school language classes while skills in the heritage language are good for nothing more than household gossip or âordering ice cream.â I couldnât disagree more! Classroom study is not the best way to learn a language to the level that is really useful. This is especially true in languages that are very different from English such as tonal languages or languages that contain a lot of sounds or grammar formations that are not present in English.
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Hmm, I am continuing to think about the question as posed. I donât know if this is an answer to the relevancy question, but I think one of the main answers to how to make the humanities more popular and how to increase the strength of students is encouraging reading and less screen time among children teens.
The strongest humanities students that Iâve known have been intellectually curious and read all the time. They read for school sure, but they also read for pleasure. And while many of them also spend more time on screens (social media, gaming, tv) than I personally think is healthy, those strong humanities students are still readers at heart. I believe that good K-12 teachers manage to encourage that love among their students --though to be fair lots of K-12 teachers are juggling so much that I am amazed that they find the time to nurture kidsâ love of reading while just trying to get through the basics.
I also think many parents need to step back from over-scheduling their kids in sports, extracurriculars, and various academic enrichment opportunities. So many of my kidsâ friends have had nearly every minute of their days, weekends, and summers planned ahead for them by parents who are anxious to mold their childrenâs success. Every once in awhile, Iâve been guilty of the same impulse, but I try to step back because intellectual curiosity in general and reading in particular requires down time --time to do nothing but let oneâs imagination soar. Iâve always loved this quote by Barbara Ueland: So you see, imagination needs moodling âlong inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering I think that sort of time given over to the imagination results in kids curious about the humanities and the sciences, and technology, which is kind of cool if you ask me. As an aside, apparently Ueland also claimed that she lived by only two rules 1) to tell the truth, and 2) to not do anything she didnât want to. Iâve tried to live by those rules in my career and life as well and most of the time they have worked out pretty well. Every once in awhile it has been a disaster, but not becuase I pursued my intellectual interests and passions.
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Both our kids can barely order ice cream (if that) in languages they studied in school (despite getting Aâs).
But they read Shakespeareâs sonnets in their mother tongue.
Having a lot of idle time and never doing anything one does not want to do may lead to success, but I would hardly call it a recipe.
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I am jealous when I hear stories from my Dutch friend. After middle school, she was put on a college track and received her education at a top university for almost free. Her brother was put onto a trade track, given an excellent technical education during the high school years, graduated with a good job, and became a thriving tradesman.
Now I know that such a system has many potential downfalls, but truthfully it would have worked great for my 2 kids. Getting my second kid to care about college-prep classes for which she has little talent and even less interest seems so futileâŠ
ETA: I do think our countryâs lack of a strong trades education track does obliquely apply to the original question (How can the Humanities evolve to remain relevant?) I think for too long it has been considered wrong to say that any student âisnât college material.â So students who would be much better off in trades get pushed into college. In college these students canât hack math or the hard sciences, so traditionally they got pushed into the humanities (truthfully, they couldnât hack the humanities either, on a rigorous level, but the humanities had a tradition of giving weak students âGentlemanâs Câsâ anywayânowadays with grade inflation they are Gentlemanâs Bâs.) But STEM? No, you would just fail. So the humanities got the reputation of being less serious and rigorous. Now, if the humanities were only studied at the college level by kids who were actually very strong students, they might get more respect, and seem more relevant.
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The pros and cons of such an early tracking system are fairly obvious. With early tracking:
- Educational offerings can be optimized for the track, rather than being generalized to cover all potential tracks. (pro)
- Deciding a studentâs path early is more likely to make what is a suboptimal decision for the student, because not all studentsâ optimal paths are obvious in middle school. (con)
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Classroom instruction in foreign languages for non-native/heritage speakers commonly teaches speaking/listening and reading/writing evenly, which is very different from how native/heritage speakers learn languages at home, where speaking/listening are commonly more advanced. For example, many Americans learn speaking/listening English as their native language at home, but go to school to learn reading/writing English. Some high schools and colleges offer foreign language courses for native/heritage speakers who want to improve their reading/writing skills.
One might suspect survivorship bias as an explanation for why âmany here on CC value their humanities degreesâ. After all if you really regretted your college degree or had failed to earn enough to pay for your kid to do anything more than community college, then you wouldnât be hanging out on CCâŠ
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Yes, a few do. Unfortunately, around here, the few schools that do so only offer this for Spanish. The kids who have Polish or Cantonese or Tagalog as a home language are out of luck. Even when their communities offer evening classes to keep the language alive and develop literacy skills etc the college admission offices donât recognize this as an acceptable alternative to high school language classes. It is a real pity.
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Without the humanities, ChatGPT will be considered good and correct writing! 
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Who is to say what is correct and what is not ? 
I am trying to be fashionably postmodern here âŠ
So I can hangout with the cool kids
I could read three books on Lincoln, Grant and Lee and learn probably as much as any class about the Civil War.
There isnât a perfect system, is there? Whatâs optimal for the whole system isnât necessarily and generally optimal for all its individual components. We all have to make choices that may be suboptimal in one aspect or another in our lives. The continental European system also enjoys an enormous cost advantage in terms of both time and money. Our system tries to send nearly everyone to college, for four, five, or even six years, at a huge cost to both individual families and the nation as a whole. Shouldnât we have recognized that we can no longer afford such luxuries and have to make choices in education? Doesnât this problem sound similar to the one we have in healthcare today? Iâm not necessarily advocating for the European system, but perhaps the most optimal system is a mix of the two?
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You are making a joke, right? If not, this statement might be one of the best arguments for why many historians believe the college board should offer AP African-American Studies.
Anyway, leaving aside the issue sof representation and whose voices/sources get studied in history courses, to read just three books about Lincoln, Grant, and Lee wouldnât even come close to covering a full course on the Civil War. Even the best three books would end up leaving out many of the most important people (of all races) who were involved in and impacted by the Civil War not to mention the many economic and cultural factors that led up to and followed the war itself.
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Three books is already two too many. At one point I told myself that any non-academic non fiction book that is more than a 100 pages is not worth reading :-). Life is short. Time is a perishable commodity.