WHERE ARE THE HUMANITIES TODAY?
Educationists are facing a dire shortage of teachers of humanities subjects, leaving one wondering whether no one has actually studied in the arts stream in the recent past. WHY? This is not a very recent phenomenon. It started some decades ago when careers in medicine and engineering were considered the be–all of life; hence an emphasis on the sciences. Those who did not make it into medical or engineering colleges fell back on the B.Sc degree for physics and math, etc., for a teaching career; even law as a last resort. Such was the pull of the scientific world that there was this all out campaign to drag every possible stream of studies into the Science category, with the application of so-called scientific methods of chart-making, experimentation and statistical compilations etc . Those subjects not amenable to such tactics were ridiculed, labeled ‘out of fashion’. When the load of B.Sc graduates was found to be unemployable, at a time when the economy with surging forward with bank...