What does it mean to be human?

The introductory class that I am teaching this term made me wonder and question, yet again, what exactly higher education is about.  

I have noticed over the past couple of years that students get a lot more focused when we discuss the economic rationale behind why anything that can be outsourced will be outsourced, and why activities that can be automated will be automated.  It is understandable--students immediately see the link between the concepts and their own lives and futures.

From the back row, a student’s hand went up.  "If robots do our work, then what happens to finding our purpose in life through work?  What about human interactions?"  Her voice seemed laden with emotions.

When it comes to such questions on what it means to be human, students know what my answer will be.  With a smile, I remind them that those questions are beyond the scope of the course in economic geography, and that I hope they would  take courses in the humanities and the social sciences to understand such important issues.

Technological advancements, which are difficult to keep up with anymore, will raise challenging questions on what it means to be human.  Even now, most public policy questions that we are grappling with are all variations of that very question.  The examples are endless and include abortion, healthcare, social security, unemployment benefits, and war. Technological advancements will only further muddy the issues.

Our responses to each and every one of the public policy issues depend on our own constructs of what it means to be human, and what it means to belong to a society and to a country.  Above all, what it means to be one of the more than seven billion humans on this wonderful planet.

One would imagine that education, especially at a level beyond high school, would prepare adults for such inquiries.  Unfortunately, that is rarely the case, for at least two important reasons.

The first is the simplistic formulation that higher education is about economic betterment.  Hence, for instance, all the rah-rah for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) and professional-sounding majors.  This is flawed for a number of reasons, especially when we think about the fact that these jobs are subject to those same outsourcing and automation dynamics. I should note in this context that my undergraduate degree is in electrical engineering.

The second reason that students do not get to systematically think about these questions is because colleges and universities have practically abandoned those in their curricular offerings.  On their part, students typically treat the humanities and social science requirements of a liberal education to be nothing more than items on a checklist to be completed on their way to getting the diploma.  In order to attract the uninterested students, academia has gone after making courses “attractive” to them. My favorite, of the ones I have come across in the news, is a course on Lady Gaga.  It will require quite some effort on a student's part to use that course as a vehicle to understand what it means to be human!

The result is that I doubt whether students will really have enough structured opportunities to think through the kind of important questions that the student raised.  If this is how we "educate" students and prepare them for the rest of their lives that begin with Commencement, then what have we really accomplished?