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Many college students will be returning to their homes this weekend to share a meal with those who might be helping pay for that education, their parents.

Parents and students alike grapple with what defines a good college education and what subjects are worth studying, and both groups might not always agree.

These and other higher education quandaries were analyzed at an Aspen Ideas Festival discussion titled: Do We Need to Rescue the Humanities?

Before they treat humans, doctors should study the humanities

 is a historian and she and Leon Wieseltier say the declining prestige of the humanities is a cultural crisis in America. 

Faust quotes Picasso, who said "computers are useless. They only give you answers."

Faust says the drop in students majoring in the humanities and the scrutiny the various subjects come under "is a danger to education, and how we see the whole purpose of education."

"Firstly, many things that we value intensely are never going to be the most renumerative things," Faust said. "And secondly we educate students for a lifetime, not one single job. We want them to have the capacity of mind to think about their fifth job or their tenth job."

One of the most important things you can get out of an education is the ability to distinguish between good and bad arguments and information. "How is language being deployed in ways that you need to unravel?" she said.
 


, a senior fellow in culture and policy at Brookings and The Atlantic joined in on the conversation. 

"I think that right now American society is suffering from a plague of quantification, or rather of misplaced quantification," Wieseltier said. "This, I think as a society, we now have to deal with the question of what can a number capture what can a number not capture. Because it turns out that many of the deepest and most essential experiences of life cannot be numerically measured."

They spoke June 30, 2016 in Aspen, Colorado.

To hear the entire discussion, click the play button above.

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Many college students will be returning to their homes this weekend to share a meal with those who might be helping pay for that education, their parents. Both might be asking themselves, what makes a good education?

Aspen Ideas Festival: Do We Need to Rescue the Humanities?

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