Tertiary Education
Why South Africa needs the
Humanities!
Since the 1990s, people have turned away from the humanities and focused on science, technology, and innovation to aid economic development and growth. There is also a strong public perception that a humanities degree limits a student’s career and employment opportunities. By Robyn Schnell, Department of Historical and Heritage Studies, University of Pretoria
But what role do the humanities play in our development? The disciplines that make up the humanities are often misconceived. Images of starving artists, graduate students packing groceries or working as waitrons, are hard to debunk. But the humanities include a variety of disciplines that study and explore what it means to be human – our behaviour, our culture, and our society. These include disciplines such as linguistics, literature, philosophy, and social sciences including history, social work, law, criminology, anthropology and, at the University of Pretoria, programmes that teach scarce skills such as speech-language pathology and audiology to name a few. In 2011, the Academy of Science for South Africa (ASSAf) published the report, Consensus Study on the State of the Humanities in South Africa: Status, Prospects and Strategies. This report stated that the humanities are experiencing a crisis characterised by: • fewer students enrolling in humanities courses; • declining government funding for humanities students; and • higher undergraduate dropout rates.
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