Engineering degrees include one, perhaps two courses on those topics. You can scrape a bare pass on the second try without taking in the material and graduate in 3.5 years instead of 3.
In a well-run humanities degree you would never pass the first year without being able to critically engage with difficult ideas, although I would have no trouble believing there are institutions that offer poorly-run ones.
I have a B.S. CS from NYU and I think I had 6 humanities, two specifically dealing with critically engaging with different and difficult ideas, 1 ethics, an additional writing course and two electives from what I recall. I imagine there are many more engineering degrees with requirements like mine. As an aside I also minored in philosophy and I know of multiple engineers who have done similar. I think painting with broad generalities does your point a disservice.
I'll also raise the point a lot more people simply don't care or don't believe these things to be unethical than I think a lot of people are willing to admit.
Discussing the different sides of difficult ideas in a classroom setting is not critical thinking. The ideas don’t even need to be “difficult” to practice critical thinking on.
Humanities does focus a lot on teaching students the current critical views of lots of things in society. But they focus far too much on the substance of the critiques rather than the process of generating and meaningfully evaluating them.
I think you are making general assumptions that are not universally true. I know its the hot take to consider any humanities program to be brain washing kids into SJWs.
Philosophy's basic main tenet is to critically engage with ideas. ONE aspect of that is to engage ideas in the politic sense
> Philosophy's basic main tenet is to critically engage with ideas.
And humanities students no longer do this. If they did, the notion of suppressing the communication of ideas rather than refuting them would be repugnant. However, this instead the first tool reached for by students who find something uncomfortable. Title 9 inquisitions, etc.
It’s not necessarily brainwashing, but it’s awfully coincidental they have nearly uniform political opinions coming out of university and can’t defend them when critically challenged.
> teaching students the current critical views of lots of things in society
Having taken the time to pursue some amount of humanities education next to an engineering degree, this isn't even close to true. If anything, humanities education is a celebration of all the things that it can mean to be human. That certain ideas are currently broadly in vogue in society (in this case I guess for the vocal minority you could say it is "nice at all costs" and "being nice should be criminal" with very little in between) is immaterial to what's happening in such a classroom.
In a well-run humanities degree you would never pass the first year without being able to critically engage with difficult ideas, although I would have no trouble believing there are institutions that offer poorly-run ones.