Comment by garciansmith

I often see comments here about how the humanities and many social sciences are pointless, should be cut, and so forth, as evidenced by this thread. Though as you say, problems with the insane cost of higher education (especially in the United States), are separate, if partially related since so many people believe that getting educated = getting a job that makes more money than if you weren't and that's education's only purpose.

But I also see how so many of the upvoted and discussed articles and papers on this site are about history, archaeology, literature, philosophy, language, etc. It has always struck me as contradictory, though of course a lot of the people who are into the latter are not those writing the former.

How do we continue to push the bounds of human knowledge and thought in those disciplines, if not through higher education? In my opinion the world would be a whole lot better if, for instance, people learned more history and learned how to more critically approach sources. But I'm biased of course, I have PhD in history.