Over the last several years, parents, educators and policy makers have placed a heavy influence on STEM education (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), citing that the United States is falling behind in global competitiveness. While placing emphasis on STEM education will help meet the lack of advanced degrees to fill technology-related jobs, it has overshadowed the importance of degrees within the humanities. In a world where there is more emphasis placed on technology-related education, how do educators illustrate the value of the humanities?

As a resident of San Francisco, I experience the necessity of the humanities firsthand on a weekly basis. For instance, on Mondays, I lead field trips for public school students to 826 Valencia, a learning center in the Mission District of San Francisco, where volunteers support under-resourced students with their creative and expository writing skills. While the Mission was once known for its vibrant community, it’s visibly and rapidly gentrifying, losing the heart of its neighborhood. Our students appear increasingly out of place amid high-priced boutiques and bars catering to Silicon Valley’s wealthiest. 

Providing a strong contrast to 826 Valencia in the Mission District, my Thursdays end late at 101 Howard, where I teach ethics to working MBA and Master of Public Administration students in the historic Folger building in San Francisco’s financial district, home to management courses offered by the University of San Francisco. The building is wedged in the financial district that symbolizes wealth and the gears of economics, and while it’s also shaped by Silicon Valley affluence, this neighborhood is where many of the city’s homeless congregate, seen as a nuisance to the nominally tolerant citizens who move past them. 

But within these vastly different parts of San Francisco, where tech entrepreneurs and struggling students commingle with little interaction, exists the very need for the humanities: the ability to share and understand stories and build community. As San Francisco takes on a larger dichotomy between wealth and social status, a humanities education is more essential than ever. Students need to learn to share stories to create empathy in order to shape future business and society leaders who will sustain our community values. 

To promote the development of empathy, I teach literature to MBA and MPA students. Demonstrating empathy is an essential part of their job if they are to succeed, as managers and public administrators have to understand people from all different backgrounds in order to create a diverse office space and address pluralistic needs. The literary texts prompt my students to think about moral conduct and find creative ways to solve problems. Engaging with these texts promotes careful observation, thoughtful reflection and generous sharing. 

The texts I use range widely in form and content and change periodically to reflect current concerns relevant to their professions. Sometimes we will read an intimate poem like Yeats’ “To A Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing,” to explore the emotional dimensions of unrewarded effort and how a thoughtful leader will respond – “be secret and exult.” Or we will parse Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to observe how a carefully crafted argument grounded in history, philosophy and experience can influence meaningful personal and political change. We’ve read Arthur Miller’s “Death of A Salesman” and considered what it means to have “the wrong dreams”. 

Students, whether in grammar or grad school, are successful when their education has prepared them to see and respond to what they witness in their communities. When their empathy transfers from the characters in a story to their neighbors on the streets, they develop skills to observe, reflect and share. If education continually reinforces these skills, moments of empathy can become habits of being. 

Humanities educators agree that proficiency in these liberal arts-based standards is essential for success. Reading deeply into great narratives, students develop the ability to transcend local loyalties and to imagine the situations of others. Through narrative analysis and reflection:

We recognize that we arrive at our lives in the middle of the story and spend the rest of our lives understanding the narratives that came before us, imagining the stories that lie ahead.

Our human task is to build on others’ stories until we are ready to tell our own complex narrative derived from experience, supported by intelligent evidence and articulated with clarity that has, at its core, what is common to us all. 

At 826 Valencia and 101 Howard, students are learning to observe with passion and scrutiny the settings in which their stories are imagined and all the many ways they can twist their plots toward empathy. This is an essential skill as office places and government institutions are embracing change and diversity because, in order to run a successful meeting or even talk with an employee or client, students need to know how to empathize and relate. While STEM subjects are an important part of education, it shouldn’t come at the expense of the humanities and the growth of our communities.