The decline of the humanities is a feature, not a bug.

The result is not only relatively fewer humanities majors but also a generation of students who get out of school and don’t know how to write well or express themselves clearly.

Science and engineering are wonderful, and absolutely essential to the world, but those fields have little to say about value and ethics, nor morality, nor beauty, nor why one should choose one path over another.

Humanities teaches one to learn for one’s self why something is worth thinking about, and how to think about it – how to de-construct it and re-combine it and most importantly to examine alternatives. It is a possible (though not necessarily actual) threat to capitalism and that is the reason for the attempted – and largely successful — purge from schools.