The most common question I faced as a high school guidance counselor was: What job will that college major give me? It was as if going to college were a transactional process — input the right code and out pops the desired job. A STEM major was the holy grail of them all, meaning Silicon Valley and Wall Street firms would line up to take your call.
As the chimes of parents ring in my ears that poetry isn’t going to pay the bills, I wonder whether our age of increased polarization, conflict and greed results from too few pursuing subjects dedicated to reflection and empathy.
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As a bitter election season looms and global conflicts polarize nations, provoking people to empathize with one another is a moral imperative that could fix our divided world. The humanities that teach this are the very subjects under threat in a world that has prioritized technological innovation over human integration.
Philosopher Roman Krznaric has termed the 20th century the age of introspection, noting that “the self-help industry and therapy culture told us the best way to know who we are and what our lives should create, is to look inside ourselves.” Given that this hasn’t healed us, he suggests that we must shift to the age of outrospection: “to discover who we are and what to do with our lives, we need to step outside ourselves, to discover the lives of other peoples and other civilizations. And the ultimate art form for the age of outrospection is empathy.”
Developing our ability to empathize derives from a desire to move beyond facts and embrace an education of stories and histories. For as Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird” noted, “you never really understand a person until you consider things from their point of view, until you climb into their skin and walk around in it.”
Our great civilizations suppose themselves to be built on these notions of interconnectivity and empathy. The United States takes as its moto e pluribus unum — out of many, one. Yet in our post-COVID world where insularity is commonplace, where the United Nations ceases to comprise nations united, and where we wait for our neighbor to act before we commit, do we really cherish empathy and the ability to genuinely connect with others beyond the functionality of Teams and Zoom?
A few years ago, at a conference that some might argue focused on soft skills, I met a lady called Jo Berry. Jo’s father was a British conservative politician who was murdered by the IRA in a bombing in the 1980s. Jo shared her story about how she met and came to know her father’s killer, a man called Pat McGee. It was an incredible story of empathy in which she sought to understand his reasons — thinking, “you killed my father” — yet struck by how normal he looked. Jo wanted to hear his pain and anger and find out how she could help him, realizing that it was only when he became open and vulnerable that the true conversation between them could begin.
A training in being receptive is generated by study of the arts, unlocking the potential to stretch across even the most pervasive of divides. And while it can be argued that few have the fortune to afford this luxury, it is good to see governments, such as Ireland, recognize its value, providing a basic income to allow diverse participation in arts employment.
Unfortunately, it appears that most of the world isn’t ready for a society of non-STEM qualified professionals. Leaving teaching in the U.K., it soon became apparent that my English degree was of little use, and I too would need to pursue a social science master’s to credentialize myself for work. For not only do employers believe that this will yield better employees, but the U.S. government supports international STEM graduates with a three-year work visa over their one-year non-STEM counterparts.
When all the signs point toward STEM degrees as being more valuable, there is little room for guidance counselors to argue, yet we must question the type of society that results.
Great writing has always inspired me, and as I think of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, who little knew that “up on the roof of the house, the rain will form a pool if the gutters are blocked, and there she would have stayed feeling safe inside, until one day she suddenly discovered the crack right down the wall,” I fear that without providing an education in the humanities, dangerous consequences will compound.
James Coltella is a Master in Public Administration candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. His research interests include political polarization, language and identity. A British and Italian dual national, he has been a teacher and school administrator.