Infusing higher education with the ‘spirit of the Humanities’
It is difficult to automate soft skills in workplaces since soft skills are owned and used by human beings (Ubalde & Alarcón, 2020). This entails that those possessing sufficient soft skills have bigger value and have greater bargaining power than those with limited soft skills (Mwita, et al. 2023, p. 507).
Universities are currently facing challenges in how to educate their students with what are called ‘soft skills’ or ‘21st century skills’. According to a Wall Street Journal survey of 900 executives, “92% reported that soft skills, such as communication, critical thinking, and curiosity, are as important as technical skills and mostly short in supply” (Chaudhry et al. 2023, p. 163). Employers are unimpressed with the pure technical skills displayed by higher education graduates and are calling for greater focus on those skills that we might call uniquely human. Of course, these skills are difficult to teach and to quantify. Students don’t come out of university with a diploma that proves their communication skills. So, whilst the research community calls for emphasis on teaching these softer skills through myriad methods, I’m going to propose a different way. I propose that we turn to what Nussbaum calls, “the spirit of the humanities” (2017, p. 7)
In conceptualising the concept of critical thinking in my previous blog, I spoke of reigniting thought and feeling. As Nussbaum argues, “the relentless pursuit of logical argument can risk stunting other parts of the personality” (2017, p. 104). To foster critical thinkers, we need to remember that our students are holistic beings, who possess the capacity for both objective and subjective thought and our job as educators is to teach them the skill of knowing which contexts ask for objective thought, which ask for subjective, and which require a consideration of both.
The humanities have the potential to foster soft skills, the foundation of teaching and learning within these disciplines encourages essential qualities in students.
The ability to question authority, norms, social structures and current ways of thinking, being, and doing in the world
The humanities teach students to question everything. The disciplines are often focussed on subjective interpretation, rather than correct answers and solutions. Students are encouraged to take nothing at face value, and instead to follow their curiosity and think creatively to consider alternatives.
Students are taught to go beyond what is in front of them, to think of the social, historical, cultural, political, and contextual influences on what has come to be. They are taught to ask ‘Why’?
The ability to feel empathy, compassion, and understanding for people and situations
The humanities foster the ability to understand multiple perspectives; students are taught to think about other people and other situations. Through this, they develop empathy, compassion, and understanding for the complexity of humanity and society.
Students are taught to engage in healthy and respectful debate and discussion together. They are encouraged to listen to each other’s perspectives, and to understand where they are coming from without dismissal. They are encouraged to learn from each other at every turn.
The ability to evaluate through multiple perspectives, lenses and disciplines
There is rarely a correct answer in the Humanities. Instead, students are encouraged to think outside of their own perceptions, to consider phenomena through multiple lenses, to understand how something can be seen and understood in different ways.
The Humanities teach students to consider multiple viewpoints, and more importantly, to respect multiple viewpoints because there is no single interpretation is ‘correct’.
The ability to think critically and thoughtfully
The Humanities is built on critical thought. It is the foundation of teaching and learning within these disciplines. There is no right answer; there is only well articulated critical thought.
The multifarious nature of interpretative thought that is fostered through the Humanities lends itself to students’ ability to formulate an interpretation based on rigorous criticality. If you study the Humanities, you can’t just say ‘because that’s how it is’. You must consider why, and then evidence your claim through critical analysis of alternative interpretations.
Students are encouraged to never trust a source on face value; they are naturally predisposed to the skill of information literacy whereby they verify their sources to validate their interpretations.
Blinkey et al. (2012) identified ten soft skills, grouped into four clusters (Boffo & Fedeli, 2018):
Ways of thinking (e.g., creativity and innovation, critical thinking, problem-solving, decision-making, learning to learn, and metacognition)
Ways of working (e.g., communication and collaboration)
Tools for working (e.g., information literacy and ICT literacy)
Living in the world (e.g., citizenship, life and career, personal and social responsibility)
What you might have noticed is that these soft skills map onto the ways of teaching and learning employed in the Arts & Humanities.
Sadly, many disciplines in higher education are focussed heavily on objective thought, focussing on rationality, technical analysis, and logic. Particularly, the disciplines that are considered ‘economically valuable’ to government bodies, such as STEM and business subjects, are those same disciplines which emphasise logic and rationality above all else.
Disciplines, such as those in the Arts & Humanities, which emphasise emotion, subjective interpretation, and criticality are the ones which are being slowly stripped of importance.
“If this trend continues, nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements” (Nussbaum, 2017, p. 2).
The Arts & Humanities disciplines are in rapid decline, and have been for a while: “Ever since the Thatcher era, it has been customary for humanities departments in Britain to be required to justify themselves to the government, which funds all academic institutions, by showing how their research and teaching contribute to economic profitability. If they cannot show this, their government support will drop and the number of faculty and students decline” (Nussbaum, 2017, p. 127). The emphasis on education as solely for economic growth has undermined the value of the Humanities. The pursuit of creating holistic citizens who possess emotional intelligence and empathy, who readily question authority and criticise the status quo, who care about humanity and their role as individuals within a collective, has been considered inessential to growing economies.
But, it should be a central focus.
In full transparency, I should admit that I come from a Humanities background. I studied my BA in English and my MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature. I started my undergraduate studies back in 2011 (ouch) and even then, I remember being asked ‘Why are you doing English? What are you going to do with that afterwards?’ I didn’t choose my discipline because of the job that I’d get after I graduated, I chose it because I loved it. I was somewhat of a rare breed, as most of my peers chose Economics, Accounting, Business, or Politics. You know, important degrees 🙄. When I chose to pursue a Masters in the Humanities, the questions became even more ridiculous: ‘Oh, so you’re going to be a teacher then?’ As if the only relevance of the Humanities is to teach it later…
When I pursued a doctorate in Educational Research, I moved to the Social Sciences and even then, because it had Social in front of it, it wasn’t met with quite the same respect as pure Sciences. I chose to situate my research within the Humanities disciplines because, quite frankly, I was shocked at how little educational research takes place outside of the STEM subjects. Does anyone care how these disciplines are taught? I began to wonder.
What was interesting, though, was that nearly every single student that I interviewed (24 total) said that they were aware that their discipline was considered a joke, a waste of money, and that they probably wouldn’t get a job, but they did it because they enjoyed it. How sad. We’ve somehow managed to diminish the Arts & Humanities to the status of ‘waste of time and money’ because they do not overtly make money. Nussbaum argues:
“If we do not insist on the crucial importance of the humanities and the arts, they will drop away, because they do not make money. They only do what is much more precious than that, make a world that is worth living in, people who are able to see other human beings as full people, with thoughts and feelings of their own that deserve respect and empathy, and nations that are able to overcome fear and suspicion in favor of sympathetic and reasoned debate” (2017, p. 143).
Of course, Nussbaum was warning us of this worrying decline nearly a decade ago. In the current landscape, we’re in even more trouble.
What is ironic in this trend of emphasising technical skills over the “useless frills” (Nussbaum, 2017, p. 2) of the Humanities is that we have now created AI that can apply technical skills quicker and more efficiently than humans can. What we have not created is AI that can apply emotion, subjective interpretation, or critical thought. In fact, in a recent test, AI completed flunked a test on critical thinking (Smith & Funk, 2024).
In our attempts to create graduates that are highly skilled in technical knowledge, logical thinking, and rationality, we have created less useful human machines. What we are rapidly at risk of losing, is a generation of citizens with all of the skills that we can’t get AI to do for us. These are “what we might call the humanistic aspects of science and social science – the imaginative, creative aspect, and the aspect of rigorous critical thought” (Nussbaum, 2017, p. 2).
So why, then, are we trying to strip these disciplines of their importance and value in the 21st-century. They may not be profit-driven, they may not make money in the same way, they may seem frivolous and airy-fairy in light on the STEM subjects. But what they do is create the kind of citizen that we are in desperate need of. Human citizens who can solve today’s problems, who can look critically at our societies and think creatively to come up with solutions for the betterment of humanity.
If we’re going to solve the skills gap, we need to take a multidisciplinary approach. We need to branch out, extend our reach and consider the value that every discipline offers. Pull them together, draw from the strengths of each, and foster individuals as whole human citizens with multiple perspectives, outlooks, and skills.
REFERENCES
Boffo, V. and Fedeli, M. (eds). (2018). Employability and Competencies. Innovative Curricula for New Professions, 163-173.
Chaudhry, I. S., Sarwary, S. A. M., El Refae, G. A. and Chabchoub, H. (2023). Time to revisit existing student's performance evaluation approach in higher education sector in a new era of ChatGPT - A case study. Cogent Education, 10(1).
Nussbaum, M. (2017). Not for profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton University Press.
