Philosophy and the humanities are underrated in education.

My opening joke was so bad, someone thought my account was hacked. Sorry. Thanks to Danielle for a serious case. I agree the humanities are important. In elementary school through high school, the humanities are vital for teaching reading, writing, and comprehension. They also are critical for teaching cultural literacy, the general body of knowledge that people need to understand how their society works. At the college level, there is value in advancing the arts my opponent cited. Focused factual knowledge is important too. We need scientists, engineers, physicians, technicians, skilled craftsmen, trained service workers, business people, and all the other applied skills needed to make society more efficient, safe, and comfortable. Our debate does not doubt the importance or either the arts or the sciences, but rather whether humanities are now underrated relative to focused skills. Jobs demand more focused skills than the humanities provide This is widely acknowledged. A survey of employment prospects makes the case. “All jobs aren't created equal. In fact, some are simply better than the rest. U.S. News 100 Best Jobs of 2013 are the occupations that offer a mosaic of employment opportunity, good salary, manageable work-life balance, and job security.” [1. http://tinyurl.com...] The survey ranked jobs according to an overall score. “The Overall Score is calculated from seven component measures: 10-Year Growth Volume, 10-Year Growth Percentage, Median Salary, Employment Rate, Future Job Prospects, Stress Level, and Work-Life Balance.” [2. http://tinyurl.com...]Of the 100 best jobs, only about a dozen are in the humanities. 18 of the top 20 are not in the humanities. (Interpreter & Translator and School Psychologist are the two I put in the humanities, though it could be argued those are focused skills.) Some jobs are hard to classify. Is a telemarketer a technical job or is it in the arts? If one is generous in the assigning the categories, there might be as 16 or 18 of the 100 in the humanities.As society becomes more advanced, machines and skilled workers do more and unskilled labor does less. “Companies all over are having a difficult time recruiting the kind of people they’re looking for,” said Robert Funk, chairman and chief executive of Express Employment Professionals, a national staffing firm based in Oklahoma City that helped some 335,000 people land jobs last year. “We currently have 18,000 open job orders we can’t fill.” ...How can so many jobs remain unfilled with unemployment so high? One explanation is that many would-be workers lack the necessary skills to fill those positions. “There is higher demand for skilled jobs and less demand for unskilled positions than we’ve seen coming out of past recessions,” [3. http://tinyurl.com...] Two examples of skills having critical shortages are machinists [4. http://tinyurl.com...] and nursing [5. http://tinyurl.com...] The high end of the job market comprises skills in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics [STEM]. According to a recently released study there are 3.6 unemployed workers for every job in the United States, but for STEM workers the situation is reversed. There are two unfilled STEM jobs throughout the country for every unemployed STEM worker. [6. http://tinyurl.com...] Present and future jobs lie outside of the humanities. Science and technology are underrated as cultivating the intellect Pro argues that “As thinking human beings, we should be questioning what kind of world we live in, what kind of world we should live in, and what kind of things we can do to reconcile the two.” I claim that disaster in society lies in theorizing a different world without an understanding of how the world be have actually works. For example, the Soviets dreamed of a world in which there was no cost of capital, and they constructed an economic system under that pretense. In fact capital cost is a law of nature, and it cannot be ignored any more than an aircraft designer can ignore gravity based upon the designers dream of a better aircraft world. The great ideological disasters of recent times, form Nazi fascism to Maoism, came from unconstrained attempts to construct a world the someone thought should be. Presently, a practical person would never suppose that a society could be built upon the premise that there is an infinite money, and that the problem faced by society is distributing it. That's a product of too much dreaming and not enough reality.Who has actually changed society for the good in modern times? Scientists, engineers, and inventors have fed the world, revolutionized communication, and cured disease. Businessmen like Ford and Rockefeller have done far more to improve the lot of humanity than any philosopher. If you want to change the world, the path is now that of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, not through studying art or history. Impractical theorizing by thinkers detached from reality give us ideologically-driven disasters. Hawking's cosmlogy has advanced philosophy more than phlosophers. Rebuttals Forcing philosophy upon high school students would be child abuse. The few who could get something useful out of it ought to use self-study. Pro argues that downplaying humanities leads to drilling on narrow skills rather than “holistic understanding of the whole lesson.” That relates to teaching methods rather than to humanities. For example, history can be taught on the basis of memorizing names and dates. Law is obsessed with case histories and the details of the laws on the books. The humanities change slowly so rote is possible. Modern engineering education is oriented towards on participating in mufti-disciplined projects and broad skills like mathematical modeling. This is a consequence of the rapid pace of technology and the need to integrate multiple disciplines. Learning the details of specific devices is pointless, because the devices are so quickly outdated. Physical principles, tools, and methods are more favored over device specifics, simply because the specifics change so fast. The same is true of science as new science is added so quickly, broad principles are stressed. I do not accept that studying the humanities improves reasoning to positive effect. “Nobel-winning economist Daniel Kahnemann argues that humans employ two different cognitive systems to evaluate new information. The first uses fast cognitive efforts such as rules of thumb while the second relies on slower, more effortful systematic reasoning. People adopt many of their cognitive rules of thumb, heuristics that are triggered by emotional reactions to new situations, from groups with whom they share cultural or ideological commitments. This theory implies that when challenged with new information or arguments, it’s just easier for most people to believe what their peers believe.” [7. http://tinyurl.com...] The context was to explain group-think among the populace, but the intellectual elite is no different. It's no accident group-think dominates. The tools of reasoning are employed to rationalize preconceptions rather than to overcome them. If it were true that the humanities improved reasoning, then by now philosophers would have agreed on the answers to the classical problems they consider. All have the same information and all are highly skilled in applying logic, yet there is no convergence of thinking. Reasoning is mainly used to rationalize beliefs. Confrontation with reality moves thinking. An imagined theoretical design for something can always be rationalized, but if it is built and fails, actual reasoning is the only recourse. Its true that technical people indulge intellectual fantasies outside of their area of expertise, but the difference is that failure is more likely to impress a practical person than an intellectual schooled in finding other things to blame than his theory. The humanities are overrated as careers, and way overrated as teaching how to think.