“If we hope that the next generation of leaders will build a world that is better than the one we inhabit, we must teach them the importance of stepping back from the urgent present to imagine a different future. The ability to innovate—a skill that nine of out ten employers agree is the most important for new hires—requires thinking beyond immediate needs and making creative leaps. Where better to model this approach than in the arts and humanities? They champion boldness in doing and thinking, leading to new and deeper understandings of the world. Training students narrowly for jobs that they can occupy immediately upon graduation is shortsighted: how many of those jobs will even exist a decade or two from now? Far better to create in students the capacities to confront the circumstances of life with a combination of realism and resilience and with habits of mind and skills of analysis that transcend the present.”
A short bit from Harvard President Drew Faust’s eloquent op ed on the value of the humanities.Read the full piece below.
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