I beg your patience.

Finally, someone agrees with one of my long-cherished rants. Inside Higher Ed has published an article bemoaning the tendency for people in the humanities to assume they don't need to have any knowledge of math and science and the way it cheapens our educational system. I disagree with Orzel's contention that this does not go both ways because I have taught the humanities in a school that was focused more on engineering and agriculture and I can tell you that the students saw no need for the humanities to intrude upon their thinking. I was raised in a home where that was a fairly prevalent view as well. However, he does have a point that at the more prestigious universities in the country, the humanities are still considered essential.

The point is that both sides of the isle suffer from the expectation that they have nothing to do with one another. An educated person should at least be able to grasp relativity and the way it relies on geometry being a far different thing than what we experience it as, they should also be understand that part of those ideas about geometry started from logical, nearly philosophical arguments about reality that only later made any difference to physics. We should all be looking at the world around us with more interested eyes and trying to understand it. I have no patience for anyone who tries to right off whole sections of human knowledge as unimportant to them (especially if they are trying to institutionalize their ignorance).



Hat tip: bookslut