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I’ve never been a fan of humanities classes.  Well, that’s not quite true.  In middle school, I had a killer English class, where the mechanics of grammar were pounded into our heads.  I walked out of that class with an understanding of how sentences are put together, a sort of hard knowledge that I could point to as the fruit of my hours of toil in that class.  And then everything seems to have gone downhill from there.  In high school, English classes essentially consisted of reading books or short stories and then answering questions about the plot to ensure we had actually completed said reading.  I never left such a class feeling that my time had been well-spent, but at least I could console myself with the fact that college classes would undoubtedly be better.

So during fall of my senior year, I took Philosophy 101 at my local university.  Going into the class, I was very excited to learn about how people actually do philosophy–I’ve always thought deeply about life, and at the time I had worked out an sort of theory-of-everything that dictated how I lived my life.  Now, this class consisted of essentially two parts.  First, we would read a philosopher, and then we would discuss how that person’s views conflict or accord with the other philosophers we had read.  I soon decided that this approach was not working for me.  First of all, there was never any indication about why we should care about the particular philosopher of the week (other than the fact that other people had cared enough about them to not burn their books).  What makes this particular person’s ramblings on the world more worthwhile than any other’s?  Secondly, if this philosopher had sat down and come up with a compelling argument in one direction, and another philosopher had sat down and worked out a compelling argument in a different direction, then at least one of them is lying to us and we really should not be reading them.  I could hardly see how we were going to find truth in all of this.  By the time I turned in my final paper, I had decided not only that I no longer wanted to pursue my philosophy major, but also that my entire system of beliefs had no more claim to legitimacy than any other.  I certainly gained no hard knowledge in that class (other than “Descartes said…” and such), and even the soft knowledge I gained didn’t seem particularly worthwhile.  But I figured that the problem here was just the particular school or the particular class, and once I was actually doing my undergrad everything would be better.

And then I found myself at Harvard.  Part of the reason I chose that school was because I did not want to sacrifice having stellar humanities classes.  I knew there was value in such courses; I just had to take the right ones.  First semester of freshman year, I did not end up taking any humanities due to scheduling.  Second semester I took the required Expository Writing class; my particular variant was entitled “Art of the Essay.”  We essentially read essays and then discussed the various elements of said essays.  I felt that about 20% of the class was useful while the other 80% was a waste of time.  The analysis of the essays’ arguments felt particularly reminiscent of the philosophy class.  We would essentially prune sentences from the work to “prove” that the essay was making a particular point.  But given appropriate pruning, one could show that the author was attempting to make any arbitrarily chosen point, and even worse, I never really understood why we should care what point the author is trying to make.  If the author really cared that much, wouldn’t it be easiest to just come out and say whatever he or she was trying to say?

My first semester of sophomore year, I decided to give the humanities classes one more try.  I took Moral Reasoning 78: Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory.  This class is more than partially responsible for my transfer to MIT the following semester.  Here we would read a classical Chinese philosopher, and then simply discuss what he said.  No thought about whether his assertions were true or even useful.  Needless to say, at the end of the semester, I had firmly given up on humanities.

Fortunately, transfer credit is a wonderful thing.  At MIT, I will have to take precisely one humanities class (provided it is also a HASS-D and a CI-H).  I am also taking 6.033 at the moment, which is a class where we read computer science papers and then discuss them.  Thus far the discussions have bordered on soft (“What sorts of things have hierarchy?”, “How does the Therac-25 paper make you feel?”) but I have hope that they will harden up in the future.