Deep within the confines of the Learning Assistance Center at Cal State Long Beach, and probably many other universities across the nation, international students secretly admit that they chose to major in some sort of science to escape English and humanities classes.
 
“I chose civil engineering because it was the easiest of the engineering majors,” a student who speaks English as a second language admits. “I couldn’t pass too many writing classes so I had to stick to a science major.”
 
As a result, this student, like many others here at CSULB, has completed all of his degree requirements but is unable to attain his degree because he is not able to pass the university’s required Writing Proficiency Exam.
 
This trend is not only found among students who find English difficult because it is their second language, at least those students have an excuse. Students at the California Institute of Technology and at technical schools across the nation are grumbling because their steady diet of raw science is being supplemented with regular doses of Aristotle, Franklin and Fitzgerald.
 
Students enrolled at Caltech are obviously not spending thousands of their parents’ hard-earned cash to major in English with an emphasis in medieval literature. So why does the school require that students destined for a sterile laboratory immerse themselves in four years of history, literature, philosophy, language, music and art studies and social science classes?
 
The answer may seem clear, but not surprisingly, the students at technical schools such as Caltech do not see the point.
 
When Chris Hiszpanski began studying electrical engineering at Caltech, he was surprised that he had not left his days of Microsoft Word behind him.
 
“I didn’t know I had to take four years of this,” Hiszanski complained. “On some level I guess it really does benefit us. But I don’t know how.”
 
The how has to do with the fact that scientific knowledge can be very powerful. This knowledge can be used to remedy bad situations, like discovering alternate sources of energy or curing human ailments. The knowledge accumulated through science can also be used for destruction, such as building newer and more efficient ways to kill one another.
 
We all depend on science probably more than we realize. We also have come to trust science when shaping our beliefs about the world. Would it be wise to send scientists, the people we trust to cure diseases and tell us how old the universe is, into their laboratories with absolutely no training in ethics?
 
The humanities help us to appreciate human life and culture and the path that has led us to our current existence. Scientists, ideally, should be forced to gain an appreciation for us before they are granted knowledge that could potentially destroy us. And they should be able to form a coherent grammatically correct sentence, that is important too.

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