What Are the Humanities and Why Should We Study Them?

As you know people that come from different backgrounds have different views, beliefs, opinions, and understandings. For this blog, I had to interview five different people. All participants were asked, “What are the Humanities and Why should we study them?”. The first person that I asked was my boyfriend, Timothy, twenty-nine year old with an associate’s degree in business and currently runs his own business. His response was “ Humanities are the different cultures, religions, languages and beliefs; we should study them for better communication in our daily lives, as well as, provide better resources in general. My second participant was a thirty year old female with her bachelors in nursing. She believes that “humanities are the study of arts, cultural background and beliefs. We should study the humanities because it’s important in the medical field because of the patient diversity.” I agree with her 100% because knowing and understanding someone’s religious beliefs and cultural background is significantly important. You don’t want to feed a Muslim pork during their stay, or give blood to a Jehovah's Witness. Sean a twenty-seven year old male nurse will be enrolling into school to obtain his master’s in the months to come. He was one of the ones that remembered taking the humanities classes in college. He started off by saying that they are different arts, painting, poetry, and film, and we should study them because they give us a sense of history. Elizabeth Macari, a twenty five year old female who is currently a nurse and wishes to be an acute care nurse practitioner

in the years to come, disagrees with Sean’s reasoning for why we should study the humanities. Her argument was that studying humanities gives us a scene of ourselves and culture not of history. Both of them are correct, if there is a thing as right and wrong in this case. The last person I interviewed was a twenty-eight year old female; she’s currently a milk tech and attended some college. In her interview she said she believes humanities are history and it’s important to learn people perspectives and opinions.

After watching the video and seeing some people struggle to answer or not answer at all tells me that humanities aren’t being acknowledged as often as it used to. For this Blog I also had to watch a Video clip “New Hampshire Humanities Council, "What are the Humanities?" and in the video they conducted the same kind of study; ages varied a little more but either the young new the answer or the really old. Majority of the people that were interviewed were able to make an educated guess which tells me just how many subjects humanities have under it.

The humanities are a group of subjects that range from literature, religion, culture, and more. Humanities teach us about ourselves, the people around us and our world collectively. We should study them to become better people as a whole, to progress more and be more.