Have you ever been asked what the Humanities are good for?

[whatthehey]

5. Winning Pub Trivia Night.

In all seriousness, I have a couple of humanities degrees including an incredibly obscurantist one, and I listen to TMS and TTC lectures in the car for fun, so I appreciate knowledge for its own sake, but to be brutally honest the main practical application I get from that knowledge in daily life is in the flippant title. Yes the Humanities certainly do give the student, formal or informal, all the breadth of insight you describe, but few people, especially among the less well-educated, live lives where that insight is immediately applicable. How many are attempting to "inform our judgments, our theories, and to fight for necessary change in our shared social structures and places?" Not how many could or should but are? In everyday life the Humanities are only useful for those who already have and value the worldview which academic knowledge supports. It's in a sense a self-fulfilling prophecy; if breadth and scope of knowledge are important to you, so are the Humanities, but the reverse is also true.