If you want to learn humanities, you can pretty much read any book anytime in your life (in fact most of the teaching in humanities is just assigning books to r

If you want to learn humanities, you can pretty much read any book anytime in your life (in fact most of the teaching in humanities is just assigning books to read). The pragmatic part of humanities is argumentation and writing. You can't get that from just reading. What you're saying is like "the value of a computer science degree over just reading programming books is marginal." It's ignoring that the most important part of the learning happens in application.