A few years ago, I was going over the answers to an exam that I had given to my introductory students. Having studied anthropology for half a semester, I had asked them to comment on the value of the humanities to students like themselves – and to society beyond.

The prompt required them to listen to three stories that I had heard on public radio: one about a Sudanese woman who wandered all over East Africa with her children, fleeing war; another about a young African American woman serving a life sentence for murder who, given the relative stability of prison walls, was cultivating her very formidable intellect; and the third about hip-hop pioneer who endured years of depression and contemplated suicide but, through sublime irony, was saved by Sarah McLachlan’s song “Angel.”

Earlier that semester, we discussed how anthropology fosters a special type of critical thinking that is especially useful in blunting stereotypes and stereotypical thinking. Stereotypes, of course, assume that all members of a group are interchangeable, that they’re all the same. Stereotypes objectify people, turning them from humans into objects: those Mexicans, those Muslims or Jews, those thugs, those liberals or conservatives, those feminists, those welfare queens, those dumb jocks, those white trash, those millennials, those gays, those Blacks, those sorority bimbos. In turning people into objects, stereotypes deny people their humanity; they dehumanize people. Deprived of their humanity, we don’t care what happens to them.

Nor are others likely to care what happens to us, whom many regard as “those shallow Americans.”

The humanities restore people’s humanity. We hear their stories; we learn of their trials and tribulations. We recognize some of the things that they’ve endured, and we measure ourselves against what they’ve accomplished – and often we come out on the short end of the stick. In short, we identify with them, and we empathize with them.

The Sudanese woman is not a hapless African, rather a fearless and determined mother who faced years of peril and yet managed to accomplish superhuman feats. The woman in prison is not a worthless criminal, but a gifted intellectual who endured constant neglect and abuse as a child. Into her teenage years, she never experienced what most of us would call a normal day; she knew only exploitation and addiction. And the hip-hop artist is not a rebellious and violent young black man, rather a sensitive and fragile poet who’s clinging desperately to sanity.

This is what a humanities education does for us.

Recently, we’ve read newspaper headlines informing us that more and more universities are dispensing with the humanities component of the undergraduate curriculum in favor of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) courses. STEM pays the bills; STEM is where the jobs are.

This development comes at a perilous time in world history; an era in which building walls is all the rage (wall-building is not just a MAGA obsession; walls are going in many places in the world). It’s clear that people understand less and less about “the other,” that they are more vulnerable to stereotypical explanations, that they are more fearful, more distrustful, more paranoid.

So, as more and more educators like myself are asking nowadays: What happens when members of society lack a worldview?

I think it’s apparent. We’re all aware of how popular the dystopian genre of film and fiction is currently. It seems like science fiction, right? Like sheer fantasy. Think again: I believe that an education system that forswears the humanities is headed in that very direction.

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