Humanities need real life

I recently asked a colleague who works in a top global bank what skills they wanted out of humanities graduates as soon as they walked off the graduation stage.

I joked with him that he should not tell me they must have “critical thinking skills” because that phrase has become commonplace.

However, he replied by saying that, although it was clichéd, “critical thinking skills” are exactly what he did want to see in graduates. He complained that, when they arrive in the workplace, graduates did not seem to have the capacity to “problem-solve”, to interrogate scenarios, to use basic logic and common sense to tackle a matter.

I wondered how I could teach “problem-solving” to my graduates as a history lecturer. This problem of the real-life applicability of the humanities vexes me daily, as I consider all the challenges facing higher education globally.

I have always felt that if I received a matric pupil with strong reading foundations, I could teach a three-year history curriculum in 18 months, Because traditionally what one really wants out of humanities students is concentrated reading and the ability to digest difficult text.

Wits history professor Keith Breckenridge has argued that a deep capacity to tackle heavy texts is the skill that distinguishes the humanities from other university programmes.

I agree that deep reading is what the humanities teach very well.

In and of itself such a skill should teach students the capacity to be a self-propelled individual who can navigate any kind of data and apply it intelligently.

But, for whatever reason, it does sometimes feel that what we are teaching our humanities students is to lean heavily towards being overly theoretical about things, with a lesser capacity to just see through the hard factors that inform the dynamism of real-life scenarios.

Our humanities students can tell you all the deep conceptual issues raised by Fanon or Foucault about power, but cannot tell you how the current maize price is affected by the current drought and what this would mean for a person living in Nqamakwe dependent on public transport – and in turn how all that relates to the quasi-urbanisation of rural settlements where traditional forms of agriculture are altered by dependence on cash and may also be affected by climate change.

The humanities cannot claim an intellectual moral high ground when we do not infuse problem-solving capacity into our “high brow” graduates.

On the surface, the promotion of technically driven disciplines always appear to be the way to go for developing economies. The Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects draw a lot of research and development funding.

But it is obvious to humanities scholars that blind overemphasis on Stem is not a silver bullet. We see so many white elephant science projects which never manage to be scaled up or which successfully have wide-scale impact because they fail to take social dynamics into account.

I can think of projects in our university that survive on their Stem label, and not because they actually make a difference.

Whatever the shortcomings of Stem, for the sake of our graduates we cannot allow ourselves as the humanities to simply rest on our laurels.

I would like to imagine humanities graduates can gain a competitive edge if they are exposed within their degree programmes to science and technology modules that equip them with technical language outside of traditional social theory.

We should be imagining a Bachelor of Arts degree where students can learn Fanon, technology and ecology.

I often wonder what kind of “critical thinking” capacity such an African graduate would display.