Humanities in the United States

Many American colleges and universities believe in the notion of a broad "liberal arts education", which requires all college students to study the humanities in addition to their specific area of study. Prominent proponents of liberal arts in the United States have included Mortimer J. Adler^[15] and E.D. Hirsch.

The 1980 United States Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities described the humanities in its report, The Humanities in American Life:

Through the humanities we reflect on the fundamental question: What does it mean to be human? The humanities offer clues but never a complete answer. They reveal how people have tried to make moral, spiritual, and intellectual sense of a world in which irrationality, despair, loneliness, and death are as conspicuous as birth, friendship, hope, and reason.

"Increasing numbers of critics view education in the liberal arts as irrelevant" or ^[16] or "learning more and more about less and less" ^[17] which no longer prepares the students for the American job market in the face of increased competition due to more graduates ^[18]. After World War II, many millions of veterans took advantage of the GI Bill. Further expansion of federal education grants and loans have expanded the number of adults in the United States that have attended a college.^[19] In 2003, roughly 53% of the population had some college education with 27.2% having graduated with a Bachelor's degree or higher, including 8% who graduated with a graduate degree.^[20] The counter view is that "A familiarity with the body of knowledge and methods of inquiry and discovery of the arts and sciences and a capacity to integrate knowledge across experience and discipline may have far more lasting value in such a changing world than specialized techniques and training, which can quickly become outmoded." ^[21]

The digital age

Researchers in the humanities have developed numerous large and small scale digital corpora, such as digitized collections of historical texts, along with the digital tools and methods to analyse them. Their aim is both to uncover new knowledge about corpora and to visualize research data in new and revealing ways. The field where much of this activity occurs is called the Digital Humanities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanities#Humanities_in_the_United_States