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This but unironically. When STEM students take humanities distribution classes, they take the same lower-level classes students of the humanities take themselves. When humanities students take distribution classes, they take dumbed-down "math for English majors" classes which the STEM majors can't take for degree progression. We should eliminate that and until it's eliminated, ignore all calls for well-roundedness of STEM majors.
The idea is that virtually everyone, as a free and politically engaged liberal subject, will have to deal with questions of politics, culture, and ethics; but not everyone will have to deal with STEM in the sense of actually requiring technical knowledge. On this particular day, there were probably more people who had to engage with questions about transsexuality (and therefore might benefit from an understanding of the history and philosophy of the concepts of sex and gender) than questions about calculus or linear algebra (particularly if we exclude people who require that sort of knowledge for their professional work). The humanities are thought to contribute to the education of a "well-rounded" individual because the humanities are everywhere while STEM knowledge is primarily utilized by professionals (and is therefore closer to a type of vocational training).
I say this as someone who makes a living as a software engineer. Knowing how to code is obviously useful for making money, but I don't think it really makes someone "well-rounded" in the way that studying history or art does, and certainly not in the way that studying philosophy does.
This isn't really well-roundedness, then, it's humanities-supremacy.
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Coming from the other side, I’d say that numeracy and clear logical reasoning is probably more important to creating the mythical “well rounded citizens” than humanities. The reason is that almost every decision made in policy or even discussion of policy positions requires logic and statistics. The idea that you can have a productive conversation about things like economics without understanding utility curves and statistics is crazy. Figuring out the percentages of trans people in a population and what the percentage of increase is kinda matters if you’re trying to make a case that the entire thing is biologically based. Algorithmic logic is extremely useful in learning to plan and communicate a plan precisely. And as far as understanding anything in science, understanding the statistics and how probabilities work and so on is critical to understanding what is going on.
Obviously, I think a well rounded person would know all of the above. The thing is though, that we’re actually nearly backwards where there’s more emphasis on exposing people to the humanities in ne form or another over and above giving people the tools to understand their very scientific and mathematical world. The results, as far as I can tell, is a world where people fall for conspiracy theories, but don’t understand science. They can’t understand science or technology because they re not forced to learn those things after high school, if they had much exposure in high school.
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