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The Student Voice of St. Joseph’s Academy • Established 1930
tudent Prints October Issue
St. Joseph’s Academy • Baton Rouge, Louisiana 2017-2018 Volume 87, Number 2 October 19, 2017
The Future of the Humanities Why Should You Care?
The following article is the first of a four-part series by senior Journalism III student Lauren Campbell. In this series, Campbell will be exploring a topic about which she is passionate: the role of the study of humanities in high school and college curricula. Student Prints is pleased to publish her series and grateful to Stephanie Riegel, advisory editor. Riegel is the editor of The Baton Rouge Business Report and host of the Out to Lunch weekly radio show on WRKF-FM. A former reporter for WWL-TV in New Orleans, Riegel is also the mother of Allison and Madeleine Woolverton, SJA class of 2015, and Michael Woolverton, a junior at CHS. Sarah Phou dreamt of being a writer as a child, but when she entered the University of Massachusetts in 2014, she knew that wasn’t an option. “Due to family pressures and the realities that had been impressed upon me by society, I felt that solely focusing on becoming a novelist would be an unwise decision,” she said. She chose mathematics as her major in her junior year because it was her mother’s dream and the easiest route to a job. She says that the job market never seems to falter for science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) majors, and the price tag of a college degree is well worth the compensation a mathematician would receive. Phou is not an outlier; in fact, she represents a growing trend. Many students across the nation are choosing what they perceive to be a practical path and majoring in a STEM subject, even if it’s not necessarily what they want to do with their lives. They see it as a better option for their long-term career prospects, and since the Great Recession of 2008, career prospects matter more and more to students and their parents. But this emphasis on STEM, whose focus is preparing American students for careers in a digital world, comes with a high price: It is exacting a toll on the humanities, the disciplines traditionally taught at universities. Fewer young people today are bothering to study history, philosophy, literature and languages because they don’t see the point, and that trend is reflected in enrollment statistics. What will this mean for higher education—and, by extension, society—in the coming decades if young people choose not to learn about the ideas, events and trends that have and continued to shape our culture and make us human? “The humanities revive our love for living,” said Harvard University philosophy professor Rachael Goodyer. “It reminds us why we appreciate the world. Art, poetry, history ... these are the bones of human beings.” by Lauren Campbell
The focus on technical and scientific disciplines, made popular by the STEM initiative, began in the early 2000s, when educators in the U.S. realized American students were lagging behind their peers across the developed world. The idea didn’t really take hold across much of America, however, until the Great Recession of 2008. Since then, both anecdotal evidence and data show that universities and their students are focused more on acquiring skills for good-paying jobs than in learning for the sake of learning. Creative writer and student of Louisiana State University and University of Massachusetts Daniel Grammer said, “Especially following the bursting of the housing bubble, and during the subsequent recession, it was made thoroughly clear that what we need now are tradesmen and -women. Senior Hannah Militello working in the ‘Go out and do someLSU Immunology Lab thing’ was a common photo by Lauren Campbell refrain. ‘Go make something of yourself.’ People who said these things didn’t have the humanities in mind, and we knew it.” The pressure to “go out and do something” encourages thousands of students a year to choose STEM majors. Louisiana State University’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences saw a 5 percent decrease in enrollment in 2014, with specontinued on page 8