Matthias Stom, “Young Man Reading by Candlelight”
A recent Salon article will have English majors cheering. Apparently American businesses desperately need people with a humanities education.
The article is excerpted from Geoff Colvin’s book Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will. Colvin writes that Google, Apple, Avon, Lowe’s, and many other companies have discovered that hiring only engineering, business, and computer science majors leads to problems. That’s because such people often lack social interaction skills and the ability to work in groups. What is needed are people who are empathetic and can understand other points of view. Therefore businesses increasingly want employees who have been trained in literary interpretation, philosophic reasoning, historical thinking, and the like.
The article mostly talks about literary training. For instance, Colin references recent neurological and social science studies (I’ve written about them here) about how literary training makes us smarter and more empathetic:
Dozens of medical schools around the world encourage or even require the reading of fiction, because it helps build skills of social interaction. It “helps to develop and nurture skills of observation, analysis, empathy, and self reflection–skills that are essential for human medical care,” says a statement from New York University Medical School’s medical humanities program. Of course, it isn’t just med students who can benefit. Research has shown that reading literary fiction improves the empathy of people generally. Reading nonfiction or so-called genre fiction–the kind churned out very profitably by the Danielle Steeles and James Pattersons of the world–doesn’t do it. But reading fiction in which the characters are more complex and the action is often driven by their inner lives seems to make us more sensitive to what’s going on in the minds of others. It’s a rare way in which we can improve our interpersonal abilities by doing something all by ourselves.
Colvin’s article also mentions David Foster Wallace’s challenging prose and the special virtues of close reading:
Far more than engineering or computer science, the humanities strengthen the deep human abilities that will be critical to the success of most people, regardless of whether they work directly in technology. Consultants Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel B. Rasmussen, arguing that “we need more humanities majors,” observe that “when you study the writings of, say, David Foster Wallace, you learn how to step into and feel empathy for a different world than your own. His world of intricate, neurotic detail and societal critique says more about living as a young man in the 1990s than most market research graphs.” The benefits in real-world pursuits are direct, they argue: “The same skills involved in being a subtle reader of a text are involved in deeply understanding Chinese or Argentinian consumers of cars, soap or computers. They are hard skills of understanding other people, their practices and context.” Skills that employers badly want—critical thinking, clear communicating, complex problem solving—“are skills taught at the highest levels in the humanities.”
This, of course, is not news to regular readers of this blog. But isn’t it nice that people who pay good salaries are also realizing it?