Engineers, scientists, and "business" people need more training in the liberal arts, not less. Those 4:00 AM moments are the ones we need more education for...

Engineers, scientists, and "business" people need more training in the liberal arts, not less. Those 4:00 AM moments are the ones we need more education for....questions of ethics, of weighing values, of being able to see and reason from multiple viewpoints, of being able to communicate efficiently, of being able to empathize accurately. Don't get me wrong - I also wish all of us were more educated in highly abstract thought (math). It's just that many of us stop learning and questioning the day we learn to count. If "value" or "riches" is a number to us, we need what the humanities reveal more than anyone. "Riches" is in the eye of the beholder, one supposes. I got a B.S. in biochemistry before my M.D., have fairly extensive software engineering experience and training, have a modestly low Erdos number....and yet I tell you my colleagues and I would be better docs and engineers with a strong emphasis in our early training on the humanities. In my case, I'd have been much better off turning my minor in English into a major, learning to draw and sculpt and create more, writing more, reading more philosophy/ethics/history, learning more foreign language. We need more medical students and programmers who major in the humanities. Medical schools in particular nowadays push hard for people from the humanities (those students also need to take a relatively few science requisites) We need people who move between disciplines more easily. We need fewer specialists. Those 4:00 AM moments...when you lack data, when you lack algorithms, when you need to understand broad fields, understand and communicate with people, and make the right ethical decisions require the liberal arts at least as much as our ability to count. To paraphrase a dead poet or two, our lives ain't about laying pipe. Go read and think over poetry and literature and history and the dilemmas a thousand cultures already worried over - we'll be better engineers or entrepreneurs or doctors.