MCAT CARS Question of the Day

Universities routinely defend general education requirements on the grounds that breadth produces better specialists. This defense is most contentious in the case of humanities courses required of students in technical majors. Critics, some of them industry leaders, argue that the classroom is a poor simulator for the messy, time-pressured communication and ethical judgment demanded at work. They cast literature and philosophy as decorative finishing schools, with little to offer a coder who will learn to talk to users only by talking to users.

Those critics are not wrong to notice a gap between seminar rooms and product launches. A semester of rhetorical theory will not teach a novice engineer how to navigate a client meeting where half the stakeholders do not know what they want and the other half do not agree. Nor will a survey of ancient ethics magically resolve a modern dilemma about data collection under vague consent. The workplace is an idiosyncratic teacher, and it imparts lessons classrooms cannot.

But it is a mistake to conclude from this that humanities coursework is therefore ornamental. The argument from workplace realism often treats every skill as contingent and every value as situational, as if there were no patterns to how misunderstandings arise or how people decide what matters. Humanities disciplines do not claim to be laboratories for office life; they claim to offer frameworks for interpreting language, intention, and meaning. They teach people to read not only texts but contexts, to identify assumptions, and to recognize when an argument sneaks in a conclusion by smuggling in a premise.

Consider the engineer who believes she can learn communication only by doing. She will indeed learn by doing, but she will learn faster, and with fewer unhappy clients, if she can diagnose which part of an interaction failed: the vocabulary, the structure, or the unspoken expectations. This diagnostic ability does not emerge from osmosis; it emerges from training that separates form from content and that forces one to inhabit perspectives not one's own. Literature is not a rehearsal for a stand-up meeting, but it is practice at inhabiting voices; philosophy is not a proxy for a compliance checklist, but it is practice at testing reasons.

The same goes for ethics. No course can supply answers to every quandary an employee will face. But courses can supply habits: to identify stakeholders, to weigh harms, to notice when a short-term gain compromises a long-term trust. If these habits are truly best learned only on the job, then every organization is a school that must bear that cost anew. If not, universities are remiss when they forego structured encounters with texts and cases that can accelerate moral imagination.

The humanities requirement is not a bet against experience; it is a complement to it. The point is not to tether programmers to Plato, but to make sure the first hard conversation a graduate has is not the first time she has thought explicitly about how conversations work.