The Humanities are an important part of any Education Curriculum

Thanks Pfalcon.I certainly will bring my A-game ;)FRAMEWORK: I readily concede that certain elements of the humanities serve as useful tools in teaching younger students literacy and basic cultural awareness. I will be focusing on showing why the humanities are not important in secondary and college-level education, which composes a substantial amount of education curricula and is thus sufficient to negate the resolution. I think my opponent will agree that the purpose of education is to prepare students for their lives ahead of them; what exactly this would entail is up for debate-- I maintain that such preparation would be centered around developing students' critical thinking skills, the basis of widely-used occupational skills, and the general ability to compete in the global marketplace. My opponent is free to contest any of that, of course.With that established, my case is built around how knowledge obtained from humanities courses in school rarely is of any use in the average adult's everyday life, whether on the job, in social events, or while voting. Obviously, such knowledge cannot be considered 'of great value' to education, which is geared towards providing practical benefits to students. The notion that the study of the humanities has a very limited scope in terms of ensuring students financial security is relatively uncontroversial-- there are just not many high-demand occupations in which knowledge of the humanities can be of aid. Based on a survey of various occupations conducted by US News, which ranked the best jobs based on factors like industry growth, median salary, and employment rate, there are only 2 occupations which are even vaguely related to the humanities in the top fifty, with both of them being teaching jobs (http://money.usnews.com...). It is quite clear that in this respect, the humanities provide extremely minimal value to education. Since a student's occupation is bound to be a rather large part of their future, this observation makes it quite implausible that the humanities could still be considered important to education. Another focus of education is teaching students *how* to learn and developing their critical thinking skills. Some would claim that studying the humanities is a valuable tool for fostering such ability, but that is easily countered by pointing out that virtually any subject can be used as a tool to teach such skills. Arguably, science and math are much a much better means for achieving that end, since they very directly apply the principles of research, critical analysis, and logical problem-solving. Cross-apply the observation that hey also have useful career applications, and it becomes obvious that they are preferable to the humanities. Advocates of the liberal arts also claim that the humanities are necessary for the development of cultural awareness. However, this is rather circular logic; the humanities are defined as 'the study of culture', so it's no better than saying "you need to study the humanities so that you can know about the humanities!"-- we are given no reason in the first place for why the average adult needs to be culturally aware to the extent that high school and university humanities classes require. The amount of awareness needed to properly function in everyday life is naturally obtained simply by living in and actively participating in society; that is the whole idea of a culture-- it is a set of customs & traditions so deeply ingrained into a society that it can be learned simply by being a part of it. Having an in-depth knowledge of a culture's fine arts is unnecessary, and so are the humanities classes which attempt to provide such knowledge.CONCLUSION: I have thoroughly shown that the humanities generally do not provide any value to students in preparing them for their future, and thus, given the purpose of education, the humanities are not important at all to the curricula of secondary schools and universities (which are included in "any education curriculum"). The resolution is negated.I look forward to Pfalcon's opening arguments :D