I don't know what college you went to, but at mine, reading was the homework, and the discussion on the books (even with the professor's inherent biases) in the class with my peers is what developed the profound thoughts and ideas that I still carry with me. Humanities might not contribute to jobs, (I'm STEM) but I don't for a second regret the philosophy classes I took.

I went to a large well ranked public university class in the United States, have both a STEM and non-STEM degree with over 200 credit hours over 4.5 years and I can think of exactly two humanities classes that had real discussions that weren't just being assigned books, largely uncritically accepting their contents and being lectured. Both classes with real dialogue were higher level classes with just over 10 people in them.

One class was about the intersection of art and technology and the other was a philosophy of science class.

There was way more critical thought and dialogue on average in my STEM classes.

If you can read through Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy and get everything out of it without help good on you, but I certainly couldn't.

The pragmatic part of humanities is argumentation and writing. You can't get that from just reading.

What you're saying is like "the value of a computer science degree over just reading programming books is marginal." It's ignoring that the most important part of the learning happens in application.

Or, you know ... history?

Or even Shakespeare, for that matter. For some, a course makes reading such material hugely more enlightening.

To you, apparently, one book is as good as another?

Can you elaborate further?

>“How is math manipulated to allow inequality and oppression to persist?”

That doesn't seem like injecting ethnic studies into math to me.

In fact, I think this is an excellent type of question. Schools should be teaching more critical thinking exactly like this, in every domain. For example, manipulation of scales, axes, statistical bias, and mathematical context are one of the key tools that people like climate change deniers use to spread their propaganda. Mathematics education should be about more than just handraulically banging out a bunch of long division. Interpretation and context are key underpinnings of mathematics.

Math is also manipulated to allow the perception of inequality and oppression to persist. It's not just one side using these propaganda techniques.

Don't you think it's important to teach children to consider how statistics can be cherry picked to support arbitrary agendas?

I'm okay with having classes pointing out propaganda so long as it is even handed in pointing out propaganda irrespective of agenda. If a professor only points out the propaganda of those with whom they disagree, that's a bad class.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/black-lives-matter-oxford...

Sorry I asked.

to be fair, there is a subset of leftist thought that advocates placing lived experiences above statistical arguments. you can see this play out on social media where people are scolded for not being fully convinced by an individual's personal story about {insert macro issue}. the argument here is not that math itself is racist (how could it be?), but that the study and application of it can be. in other words, if statistics is disproportionately studied by an already-dominant subset of society, its application will likely lead to conclusions that more or less support the status quo.

"You get a no-penalty 'incomplete' and can complete the course later" seems vastly more appropriate than saying you learned something that you haven't. I'm sure some people were negatively impacted; they should not suffer a poor grade as a result. Nor should they be granted a better grade than the ability they demonstrated.

I'm not necessarily saying it is, just that the issue covered in the article is only tangentially related to the "math is now racist" strawman. personally, I think no-penalty incomplete would be more fair, although I'm sure someone could find issues with that too.

my guess is "lenient grading" starts to seem more reasonable when you take into account what a lot of schools were already doing in response to covid and remote learning at this time. giving incompletes is a reasonable measure to take when you have a couple students with extenuating circumstances. but what do you do when almost all the students have been impacted by a sudden shift to remote learning? you can't just give the whole class an incomplete and delay everyone by some fraction of a semester.

Why not? If it was medical school and you didn't learn topic XYZ, you'd rightly be held back until you did (or at least I hope you would).

Are we giving grades based on effort/attempt or based on knowledge acquired?

it's not really that simple. grades are just a way to measure how well students have met the course expectations. the expectations may or may not be reasonable in the first place. if there was no curving and year after year, 90% of students fail a course, the material would get adjusted. either fewer topics would be covered, or less difficult problems would be selected from each topic. the syllabus itself is an implicit curve, in a way. when someone designs a data structures course, they design it in a way that a target portion of the students will actually pass the class. they don't just say "well, arrays, linked lists, binary trees, rb-trees, BSPs, splay trees, octtrees, hashmaps, bloom filters, skiplists, and all the different types of heaps are essential topics and everyone who can't master every single one in 16 weeks fails". there's no objective standard for exactly what set of topics needs to be covered and learned in a particular course (or major), you just try to teach as much as is reasonable.