I constantly hear from my friends who are STEM majors how easy my classes must be or how they wish they were an English major too so that they could just read all day as their only homework. I will concede that I would rather take an English midterm, based only on having a general knowledge of certain books, than a biology midterm, based on highly specific facts, any day, as I’m sure many others would too. However, that doesn’t mean majoring in English, or any other humanities major, is the ‘easy’ choice.
I think that a lot of people who claim that humanities majors are easy fail to recognize the power that art has in the world. Whether it’s visual art, writing, or a song, any art form has the capability of illustrating something important about the human experience. Artists put so much of themselves into the art that they create, and the job of an English, film, or art history major (among others) is to analyze such art and figure out why and how the artist created what they did. It’s no easy feat, and my classes often spend hours analyzing one short poem to get to the bottom of what the author’s intention was. That’s the power of humanities majors: we reach into the minds of these people who created art even thousands of years ago, fostering a form of human connection impossible with any other medium.
Art reaches people in different ways, and that’s what’s so special about it. In STEM fields, there tends to be only one right answer; you solve a problem, and you’re either right or wrong. That’s not true of the arts, as everyone sits with films, poems, and paintings they encounter slightly differently. There isn’t usually a ‘right’ answer when questions are posed in humanities classes, because what’s important is why the art matters to each individual. Hearing how art impacts other people is a way of cultivating understanding between diverse groups, who find out so much about each other based on the art they each love.
The arts are so impressive because they have this ability to take massive concepts in our world, like love, hate, sadness, etc., and distill them down into a simple line of poetry, or image in a painting. The role of a humanities major is to closely analyze writings and images to analyze what concept the author is aiming to represent. In doing so, we’re able to understand these rather abstract concepts of love, hate, or sadness more concretely, and that’s just another way in which art brings people together.
Overall, I would venture to say that humanities majors, far from being the easy choice, have the job of unpacking why art is so impactful and how it works on people everywhere in the world. We’re able to deeply understand the artist through processes of analysis, and we’re also able to understand each other very well by sharing how the art we encounter impacts us. Digging through a mass of metaphorical language and abstract imagery is difficult, but the result at the end is a clear idea of the human experience.