I read an interesting article in The Straits Times a while back, and it has always been at the back of my head ever since. It seems that, not just in Singapore but also everywhere in the world, people are thumbing their noses at Plato and thumbing through books by Planck.

Do you think that, in today’s society, we do not really have to care what the humanities (philosophy, sociology, political science, literature etc…) have to tell us? Rather, we should care about what the sciences can tell us because they help us to get rich? Yep, no one gets rich studying philosophy…

A constant question that I ask when talking about education is ‘What is the purpose of education?’ No doubt, studying useful subjects like engineering and medicine will help us to make tons of money. However, without the study of humanities, we lose what makes us human.

A lot of the sciences we study today originated from the study of humanities. One of the examples I love to quote is Rene Descartes (he of the “I think, therefore, I am” quotation). It was in his writings on the topic of rationality and the need for pure reasoning that the branch of mathematics - Cartesian coordinates, came from. Adam Smith, the famous author of the ‘Wealth of Nations’ which most of our modern economic theories come from, was first and foremost a philosopher, not an economist. His book “Wealth of Nations” was written to address the lack of inequality in society and how society can solve it. If we are to discard the study of humanities, won’t we also be discarding the potential insights that some thinker will come up with about the world?

However, Man being ever so practical, seems to treat the study of humanities as 2nd-rate. In Singapore, we are no better. Based on anecdotal evidence, it would seem that the NUS Arts Faculty is attracting top students to the faculty in recent years. Not that suddenly these straight-A students like to know what Shakespeare said, but because the Department of Economics is there. It seems that parents want their Ah Huay and Ah Huats to become the next chairman of Citicorp.. Practical bunch of people they are, our parents.

The study of sciences tells us what the world is like. The study of humanities tells us what we are. We can’t do without either of them.


“Ignorance, the root and the stem of every evil.” said Plato. Tell me what you people think.

Labels: Education