The humanities majors with the most future

When a giant like Japan set out this year to promote technical careers over the so-called “arts”, there was a large-scale earthquake that made us in the West wonder if we should not turn around and take that path. However, the justifications about the alleged bad professional opportunities of humanities careers, or the questioning of their “usefulness” when knowledge – any knowledge – is within our reach with a click of a mouse, is shattered in a world that, really, is going to need professionals to reinterpret it from top to bottom.

• Social Education: A very new discipline, but much in demand that will have a great future in these times because it tries to study and interpret social dynamics and the way to reintegrate those people who have been left out of them in some way. Identify present and future risk groups or provide protection to those groups that are most likely to be left out of the game, either due to economic problems or because they have some type of disability.
• Pedagogy: With a world in the midst of a pedagogical revolution, graduates in this area of knowledge will be more than in demand in the future and, together with teachers, will play one of the most important cards in the face of the profound changes that are coming. If Maria Motessori, for example, was indispensable for the world to improve and more than relevant when it came to making governments around the world aware that education was going to be the machine that would drive the train of the future already at the end of the nineteenth century, the truth is that now, when all the curricula of the future are being reformed at a forced pace, We need fresh and disruptive ideas to reinterpret the way we teach and learn.
• History: A new panorama, a new world, needs to try not to fall back into the mistakes of the past. It is therefore important to know better and better our history and how the delicate mechanism of events that has brought us here has been built. Good professionals in History will be necessary to unravel these secrets, warn us about mistakes, but, above all, highlight and enhance our successes to repeat them and dynamize them as much as possible.
• Advertisement: With the reactivation of the economy, the market and its competitiveness will return and, in an increasingly competitive market, with a foreseeable reorganization of many parts of it, it will be necessary to find advertising professionals who know how to make attractive the new options that will inevitably end up opening up. As in the field of journalism, the irruption of the internet has made it necessary for new ideas to take advantage of everything that the new medium offers.
• Linguistics: Only in the field of Artificial Intelligence, a field in which the first steps are still being taken, even if they are giant steps in recent times, there is plenty of room for linguistics. The task of making the new artificial intelligences as similar as possible to our ability to recognize the world and, above all, to sublimate and interpret it will be, in part, a success for linguists who will have to teach the new machines to communicate with us and to develop intellectual activities similar to humans. Not only that, in the field of current programming and, of course, in the development of more efficient search engines, graduates in this field have the important role of making programming simpler and more understandable, as well as making search engines work in a much more intuitive way.
• Journalism: The world of information has undergone a 180-degree change thanks to technology. The so-called traditional media (television, radio and press) are being replaced by all the possibilities offered by internet technology (podcasts, blogs, video channels, confidential channels…). What was once only a small percentage complement to the analogue medium has now become the antitrust of the large media groups that turn to the network. In a changing landscape, it is becoming increasingly important to distinguish propaganda, advertising and news, and for this we need the help of true journalists who know how to filter, articulate and offer truthful and reliable information.

In short, in a world in which technology has gone from being the disruptive effect of the industrial revolutions of past centuries to occupying facets of our daily lives (a profound change that has occurred so gradually that we have not realised it), the truth is that humanistic knowledge and the arts will play a role that will continue to be fundamental. Not only because it completes areas within that technology, such as industrial design or helping to improve existing programming. Per se, literature careers help us to better explain the world around us, understand its dynamics and continue to help us in the learning and teaching processes.