My first text written in English — Humanities do matter (opinion essay)

São Paulo, 2018

The preconception about the humanities

The cross-eyed

Have you ever gone through this situation when somebody asks you what are you graduating from college and if you say “engineering” the person goes “wow, that’s awesome!”, but if you say something like literature, or linguistics, or history the person looks cross-eyed at you and gives you a forced smile and say “oh, cool.”? Everyone who has passed through this knows that people do not understand or do not try to understand the importance of humanities.

Ebony and Ivory

Subjects like history, geography, language, philosophy and many others that enter in the classification of humanities do not receive the respect and consideration that they deserve. Even at school, most teenagers do not appreciate it, and when the time to pick a course for college comes, just the minority chooses humanities courses. And when a humanities course is chosen, not everyone is supportive on that decision, because “you can do nothing with this” or “you can not make money with this”, and no one seems to realize that one can do this just because one wants or loves it. But above all no one seems to realize that the humanities are as important as medicine or any other subject.

To make it clearer there is a perfect speech of Elizabeth F. Cornell in her website: “Without the humanities, Albert Einstein might only have studied science and math. […] Imagine if Einstein hadn’t been acquainted with the philosophy of Spinoza, which helped shape his understanding of order and determinism. How might that have altered his formulation of the theory of relativity? If Einstein had never learned to play the violin, how might that have affected his ability to arrive at E=mc2?”. Cornell was able to show that even when it is about exact science, human sciences are important. In other words, exacts science and humanities should be able to exist just as ebony and ivory in Paul McCartney’s piano, in perfect harmony.

Humanities are the areas of study that connects directly with the human being, is where all the emotions and feelings are, is where it is found our history. Exact sciences are fine, and we also cannot go on without them, but life isn’t made of rules, in life nothing is assured in any sense. Life is uncertainties, is something completely mutable. Life is humanities, not exacts.

Not just another brick in the wall

So, humanities do matter, it is with them that we learn what happened in the past, so that we do not make the same mistakes in the future, is with them that we become able to interpret the world that we live, humanities are the scope for imagination, and for the critical opinions. Without humanities we would be just as it is said in the Pink Floyd’s song from 1979, we would be just another brick in the wall.