Side note, this guy talks about painters and poets. Why are all these anti-maths so hung up on poetry?
As Bostonian (and you) helped us see in the thread about maths and white privilege, there is a point there, however poorly articulated. And while I don't trust the professor who wrote the book we were talking about, I can see that there is a problem in that area.
Our education system has developed a zeal for STEM subjects. This is good in that we're in golden age of technology development, but it goes too far in that our society has become dismissive of the humanities.
I'm a scientist, but have a bachelor's degree in history. I also took a lot of English and other courses in the humanities, and they taught me a lot that the STEM field hasn't. Many writers ask us to question assumptions, or to look at something from a new perspective. I wrote hundreds of essay pages in college. They taught me
- How to think through a situation ("What are the ramifications Macbeth's cunning plan? How can this go sideways?")
- To ask if something hidden is going on (e.g. can you trust the narrator in this novel? What about Nazi schemes to blame their perceived enemies for an attack when they had carried out the attack themselves?)
- How to organize my thoughts and how to make points.
This kind of thing is lacking in American education today, and all sides of society contribute to it: college students who howl about the evils of reading books by dead white people make the situation worse. Companies that expect their employees to arrive already trained make it worse. Tests composed largely of questions that can be answered in minute or less. And our national obsession with those tests takes that problem several steps further. And then there are the "essay" questions, which are graded in ten minutes or less and which are not graded on content.
Taken together, we've worsened a problem where politicians can succeed at pandering to the worst of our natures and get away with lying. This was always bad (e.g. Nixon's southern strategy). Now it's worse, IMO, because people are less prepared to think about stuff.
So, yes, we need to know maths. But we also need to know about history and human nature.
