I went to a college of liberal
arts and sciences.  There was a
big load of required humanities
courses, but the college had a
relatively good physics department
and a terrific math department.
And math and physics were my interests:
So, I majored in math and had nearly
a major in physics.<p>For the humanities, they claimed to
teach about people, but at the time
I couldn&#x27;t see that they were
doing at all well at that, and later
I concluded that actually the
humanities are not at all good
about teaching about people, e.g.,
get as much that is wrong as right
and, really, darned little good
insight, but that parts of clinical
psychology could teach some important
and reasonably credible lessons about
people.<p>I really liked music, and the record
collection in the library was terrific,
but I never took a course in music --
later started violin and made some
okay progress eventually.<p>But for the humanities courses I took,
i.e., was <i>force fed</i>, I came to
hate as nonsense, misleading about
people, and otherwise a waste of
time.<p>E.g., history:  I wanted to learn
some about history, but the history
course was absurd, from some 
pompous, pretentious text with no
overview and otherwise nearly
impenetrable.  And the darned
course took so much time before
year 1 that it never got to
the 20th or even the 19th
centuries.  Bummer.  Finally
I learned some about history from
some books and some 
relatively serious
TV documentaries, e.g., <i>Victory
at Sea,</i> <i>The Battle of Britain</i>.  
The courses?  Bummers.<p>In the history courses, I wanted
to learn <i>why</i>, that is, the 
causes or at least the candidate
causes -- metals, domesticated
animals, open ocean sailing,
relatively productive crops, etc.,
but the courses essentially ignored
all concepts of causes.  Bummer.<p>Overall, IMHO, the humanities
are suffering from lack of good
methodology.  In particular, 
their <i>results</i> are open to a 
lot of individual <i>interpretation</i>
and definite <i>maybes</i>, and it&#x27;s
tough to have the work be
<i>cumulative</i> in any very
useful sense.