Just anecdotal evidence. But I am curious if there is any published data one way or the other on this. I doubt I am far away on what the numbers are on this.
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If Humanities majors are avoiding science and math classes (not sure they are), and claiming that they are useless, the same criticism would apply to them in my view. As things stand, however, there are no endless threads or social conversations about the uselessness of STEM. Quite the opposite. So whereas a HUM person who avoids STEM is just as one dimensional in my view (not the advice Iāve given my kids), our society clearly advocates for one specific version of this one-dimensionality (STEM good, HUM bad), and those in positions of power push for that to be implemented in practice.
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Of course, we all have our own anecdata based on our own experiences, so just to be contrary Iāll say your numbers seem high to me. Most of the STEM kids I know take the minimum humanities etc requirements, either because they want to actively avoid them, or because they want to use the credits for advanced study in their major. At most colleges requirements would max out around 25%. Many allow some exemptions for high school test scores, etc, so itās often lower for the kids with good high school preparation.
That said, it is a fact that STEM majors almost always have greater non-STEM requirements than the reverse. Maybe thatās something the colleges should rethink in the 21st century. Presumably the schools like MIT that have heavy non-STEM requirements do so because they believe itās important for their students.
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I had assumed it was because of the prerequisites. Often an advanced history course is open to all. An advanced physics course requires at least 2 and possiy more prior courses.
That could be part of it. But none of the colleges Iām familiar with require upper level coursework in any distribution credits, just a variety of disciplines. In fact, itās often assumed students will be taking introductory, or āfor non-majorsā versions of the subjects outside their own areas of interest/preparation.
My daughter took AP lit in public school and they read one complete book the entire yearā¦ I canāt even remember whatā¦ everything else was excerpts from an anthology. This is one of the reason my younger kids are in private school. My kids in junior high and high school are reading:
- The Iliad
- The Odyssey
- The Three Theban Plays, Sophocles
- The Oresteia, Aeschylus
- Meno, Phaedo, Apology, Plato
- Job
- The Great Divorce, Lewis
- Poetics, Aristotle
- The Gospel of Mark
- Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
- Laws and On the Republic, Cicero
- The Aeneid, Virgil
- Julius Caesar, Shakespeare
- Metamorphoses, Ovid
- Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
- The Confessions, St. Augustine
- The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius
- Beowulf
- King Lear, William Shakespeare
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and āSir Orfeoā
- Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso*), Dante Alighieri
- The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
- Medieval Poetry (selections)
- Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare
- Paradise Lost, John Milton
- Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
- Tess of the DāUrbervilles, Thomas Hardy
- The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser
- Dracula, Bram Stoker
- Peter and Wendy, J.M. Barrie
- Selection of Poetry (ranging from Chaucer to W.B. Yeats)
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
- Selected short stories/essays: Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville
- Selected poetry: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Paul Laurence Dunbar
- MacBeth, Othello, Hamlet, William Shakespeare
- The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevksy
- Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
- The Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot
- Selected short stories: James Joyce and Flannery OāConnor
- Selected poetry: Robinson Jeffers, E.E. Cummings, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, James Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Stephen Crane, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and Jane Kenyon
This is on top of the extensive reading the did in grammar school including Uncle Tomās Cabin, Tom Sawyer, The Hiding Place, The Hobbit, The Chronicles of Narniaā¦ and a bunch of other stuff I canāt recall at the moment that isnāt included in our high school scope and sequence list. Theyāre also reading a ton of primary source material in their history and government classes thatās not included in this list. Even pulling out the specifically Christian material like St. Augustine and Boethius, this is the kind of reading kids should be doing before they leave high school.
Edited to add-my high school senior has read each and every book on this list and can intelligently discuss all of them. Heās a stem kid, but has a solid humanities foundation, which IMHO should be the goal of education.
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I have heard this from others. When did excerpts become acceptable in lieu of actually reading literature?
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This is older data than Iād like, but you can see the asymmetry in sponsorship between humanities majors taking stem classes and stem majors taking humanities classes:
I donāt see this case being made enough of, or at all frankly:
Separately interesting: Students don't pursue STEM because it's too hard, say 52% of Americans | Pew Research Center
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I do not know, but I find it disturbing.
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Me too. I expect that many resource-limited public schools, rather than purchasing the 10-12 books for each student that might be desirable in an AP Lit course, rely upon anthologies and photocopied excerpts of actual works.
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This is a guess, but I remember my kids had classes where theyād study one or two classics in-depth, such as one of Shakespeareās plays and The Odyssey, and supplement that with excerpts from selected books.
Some people may find that acceptable. I do not.
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I think it was a time constraint more than anything. Thereās only so much you can cover in a class.
How else are you going to cover the entire ācanonā?
Grinding through 25 books in a year just breeds misery.
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No one said it had to be done in a year-there are 4 years of high school English. Nor did I suggest one needs to cover an entire canon, however one defines the canon. But reading the spark notes version of a classic doesnt come close to the actual work, nor do brief excerpts ( except, perhaps, Canterbury Tales where the work is broken up into separate Tales, or Dante).
Iām with you. This is why the best high schools around me (usually privates) do not offer AP English and History courses, only the math and science ones.
I had a horrible experience with AP English back in the stone age (in those days there was only one version, I guess what is now called AP Literature). It was horrible because it was the worst kind of āteaching to the testā. But at least we read actual books, and quite a few of them as I recall.
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Perhaps students are no longer willing or able to read 200 pages per week for the course as we did?
At the private school I teach at we have separate writing and literature classes. This list I posted above is 6 years of literature curriculum. Itās completely doable. The class sequence does include AP Lit and AP Lang. We do not teach to the tests, but our students tend to score very high on the AP tests.
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The ācanonā is covered at Princeton over a two-course load package over two semesters, and it is considered brutal. This course is not mandatory. They read 60 books over the year. I doubt some like this can be done in high school. My son shopped the course, but decided against it because he felt that he wonāt be able to savor any of it at that pace.
Thatās not necessarily true. Caltech, for example, requires all its students to take advanced/upper level courses in the humanities and social sciences (at least one each) in the areas where they have also taken the intro/lower level courses.
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