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High-tech and Humanity: 'English Majors Are What We're Looking For'
Townhall.com ^ | July 26, 2013 | Suzanne Fields

Posted on 07/26/2013 10:40:44 AM PDT by Kaslin

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To: Kaslin

How hard it is too major in English? When its you’re fist language. Arts and cratfts magors is pointless.


21 posted on 07/26/2013 11:15:33 AM PDT by cdcdawg (Be seeing you...)
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To: Kaslin
In a digital age, no one much cares that the humanities major is an endangered species. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in a report titled "The Heart of the Matter," makes the case that, like the natural sciences, the humanities feed "mental empowerment." True enough, but the report ignores important reasons why young men and women ignore a humanities major today. Tenured professors smother the beauty and truth of the ancients with arcane jargon, trading the wisdom from the forest for the weeds of multicultural and politically correct revisionism.

That's too bad. Without the passion that stirs the soul with great writing, it's easy to overlook the riches of a liberal arts education. When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad, he noted that Apple's DNA was not made up of technology alone. "It's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our hearts sing," he said. Jobs was not alone in recognizing that the high-tech employers seek innovators who employ imagination, metaphor and storytelling, all growing from the rediscovery of great works of literature.

Ping for later

22 posted on 07/26/2013 11:15:45 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
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To: cdcdawg
How hard it is too major in English? When its you’re fist language. Arts and cratfts magors is pointless.

Are you pulling our leg, lol?

23 posted on 07/26/2013 11:16:34 AM PDT by RegulatorCountry
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To: rarestia

Ditt here. Documentation, training, and communicating with the end user.


24 posted on 07/26/2013 11:16:45 AM PDT by Mrs.Liberty (Somewhere in Kenya AND Delaware, villages are missing idiots.)
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To: Snickering Hound

25 posted on 07/26/2013 11:18:23 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
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To: Mrs.Liberty

err...ditto! DOH!


26 posted on 07/26/2013 11:19:18 AM PDT by Mrs.Liberty (Somewhere in Kenya AND Delaware, villages are missing idiots.)
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To: taxcontrol

That’s where I come in. heh


27 posted on 07/26/2013 11:21:33 AM PDT by rarestia (It's time to water the Tree of Liberty.)
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To: rarestia

A very senior Oracle consultant once said about his new assignment:

“They have all sorts of different systems running here. And as near as I can tell, absolutely none of it is documented. All of the documentation is in the head of an employee named Sri. And, as near as I can tell, if Sri goes out for lunch and gets hit by a bus, this company goes out of business fifteen minutes later.”


28 posted on 07/26/2013 11:23:46 AM PDT by Buckeye McFrog
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To: Romulus

“If all you want is a skill, why go to college?”

Football games on Saturday afternoons, beer, keggars, college chicks, college chicks and parties, friends from different places with different viewpoints, intramural sports, some liberal arts knowledge to go with useful skills and knowledge, a four year degree to qualify you for grad school in something that will make you employable for a reasonable income. Proper sentence structure is purely optional. :)


29 posted on 07/26/2013 11:24:31 AM PDT by Avid Coug
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To: Kaslin

What you really want are people with a double major in Math and English. You want people who can write about something they actually understand.


30 posted on 07/26/2013 11:26:19 AM PDT by Senator_Blutarski
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To: Kaslin

On a more serious note than my previous post, one reason the humanities are in trouble is because they are overrun with Marxists. History and English departments mostly offer lots of courses on the Marxist-Feminist view of this, that, or the other thing. Genuine scholarship takes a back seat to Political Correctness. I’m very glad that I came through a department that wasn’t like that (over 20 years ago).


31 posted on 07/26/2013 11:26:46 AM PDT by cdcdawg (Be seeing you...)
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To: Senator_Blutarski

People with both skill-sets are not very common. A rounded education once helped it along, but that’s no longer the norm.


32 posted on 07/26/2013 11:29:51 AM PDT by cdcdawg (Be seeing you...)
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To: rarestia

Me toooooooo! Loved being an English major, reading books and writing book reports was a blast!


33 posted on 07/26/2013 11:30:59 AM PDT by yldstrk (My heroes have always been cowboys)
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To: Revolting cat!
... writing code for internal use (by those same engineers, by the way) we wrote our own documentation, and it was better than ...

My group did the same. Users rarely had to call to ask how to make something work... it was all covered. We usually only heard something if a bug in the code popped up.

34 posted on 07/26/2013 11:31:45 AM PDT by ken in texas (The Obama Excuse: They never told me and I didn't ask.)
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To: ClearCase_guy

those that don’t know history are condemned to repeat it; we need more of you


35 posted on 07/26/2013 11:32:24 AM PDT by yldstrk (My heroes have always been cowboys)
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To: Buckeye McFrog

Yes... that’s the same MO here.


36 posted on 07/26/2013 11:35:26 AM PDT by rarestia (It's time to water the Tree of Liberty.)
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To: yldstrk

I was a composition major. I spent more time writing than reading.


37 posted on 07/26/2013 11:36:13 AM PDT by rarestia (It's time to water the Tree of Liberty.)
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To: Kaslin
Don't think I ever saw an English major at the company I worked for..................THANK GOODNESS!!!

Just an observation :)

38 posted on 07/26/2013 11:41:22 AM PDT by The Cajun (Sarah Palin, Mark Levin, Ted Cruz......Nuff said.)
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To: rarestia
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAhahahaha!!!

"You can lead an engineer to documentation, but you can't make him read it!" classic..

To be certain, we don't like to write stuff down. And reading docs is for wimps. "Hell, no, I didn't read it! Let's fire this baby up, and see what happens!!!!" :-)

However, I'd argue that it's hard to find an English major (recent grad) who can keep up with Engineers. They're certainly better than anything with "Studies" in it, because I'd assume that an English Major at least would be able to read and write English. "Studies" majors? Not so much.

So, if you're technical enough to hang with the geeks, and literate enough to communicate well....you're one of a rare breed, indeed. :-)

39 posted on 07/26/2013 11:41:49 AM PDT by wbill
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To: Kaslin

“It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our hearts sing,”

http://www.johnspeedie.com/healy/bull.wav


40 posted on 07/26/2013 11:51:51 AM PDT by BenLurkin (This is not a statement of fact. It is either opinion or satire; or both.)
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