The focus, the procedure, the emphasis, the substance of the humanities promotes and trains critical abilities. They provide the tools for freeing us from bondage to systems that lock us into certain ways of thinking and doing. They are tools for liberation because they enable us to tease out, discover, uncover, criticize and understand our cultural determinants. These too are neither available to nor honed by a straight-forward technological education. I have often been struck by the narrowness of vision in trade schools, whether that trade school is Law, Applied Health, Divinity, Medicine, or whatever.
Professional schools are conceptual ghettos.
Our years of training, conversation, and involvement with our professional colleagues develop in us a certain mind set, a certain way of seeing the world, others, ourselves, and our roles. That becomes our world. It is a little like putting on a special pair of eyeglasses which would emphasize certain colors or diminish others, emphasize certain shapes, obliterate others. For example in medicine, the body must necessarily be looked at mechanistically. Contrast this with the perspective of artists in any medium painters, poets, musicians on the human body.