Applying the Humanities to the Real World
A 3-Step Approach
Robin Capehart
Oct 12
Almost every college catalog promises the same thing:
If you take the general education courses that make up a third of a college degree you’ll learn how to think critically, solve tough problems, communicate clearly and make good decisions.
Those are great skills and everybody needs them. But in many cases, there is a gap between what colleges promise and what typical general education courses actually deliver.
In technical majors like nursing, engineering or computer science, students have to prove they can actually do the work before they graduate. But in many humanities departments, the standard format still leans on sitting in a seat, listening to lectures, writing traditional essays and taking exams.
To be fair, there are dedicated professors out there who push their students to apply these subjects in creative ways. Dr. Robert DiClerico used his political science course at West Virginia University to develop just such skills. To this day, I remember lessons learned.
But across higher education as a whole, that remains the exception rather than the rule. If colleges want general education to consistently mean something, they need to shift from measuring time spent sitting in a chair to proving what students can actually do.
How General Ed Is Commonly Taught Today
In many general education classrooms, the routine remains fairly traditional:
1. The professor stands up front and lectures for an hour.
2. Students take notes and read the assigned books.
3. Students memorize dates, facts or book summaries for a midterm.
4. Students write a paper that is read primarily by the instructor.
While individual faculty members often bring passion to these topics, relying solely on this structure makes it hard to build lasting skills.
A major study called Academically Adrift tracked thousands of college students and found that 45% showed no real improvement in critical thinking or writing during their first two years of college.
Research from Harvard shows that listening to a lecture can make students feel like they are learning, but when you test them on how to apply that information, they often struggle.
When a course primarily tests whether a student can recall facts or mirror an instructor’s viewpoint, it proves attendance and effort—not necessarily that the student learned to apply those ideas independently.
3-Step Learning Loop
The Purpose College would ensure that general education courses build practical skills through a simple three-step loop offers a clear path forward:
1. Read the Story
2. Find the Lesson
3. Use It in Real Life
Books, history and social sciences are full of instruction manuals for how real life works. The true test of whether a student understands a great text is not just writing a book report. It is taking the core lesson from that text and using it to address a real problem.
Here is what that looks like in the humanities:
1. George Orwell’s 1984 (Learning How to Spot Fluff and Bad Rules)
Step 1: Read the Story. Students read about “Newspeak”—a fake, simplified language created by a government to confuse people and keep them from thinking clearly.
Step 2: Find the Lesson. When people in charge use confusing or overly vague buzzwords, they are often trying to hide bad news or dodge responsibility.
Step 3: Use It in Real Life. Give a student a real corporate memo about layoffs filled with corporate fluff like “optimizing human capital allocation to enhance fiscal agility.”
The Task: The student rewrites the memo in plain English (“We are losing money, so we are firing people”) and explains in two sentences how the corporate memo used Orwell’s “Newspeak” to hide the truth.
2. To Kill a Mockingbird (Learning How to Do the Right Thing)
Step 1: Read the Story. Students read about Atticus Finch defending an innocent man even though his whole town turns against him and his kids get harassed.
Step 2: Find the Lesson. Doing the right thing is rarely free. It usually costs you something real, like your job, your reputation or your social circle.
Step 3: Use It in Real Life. Give a student a scenario where a construction worker notices his company is using weak, cheap concrete on a new building. If he speaks up, he will probably get fired and cannot pay rent. If he stays quiet, the building might fall down.
The Task: The student explains what Atticus would tell the worker to do, spells out the real risks involved and writes out a clear plan for how the worker should handle it.
3. Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Learning How to Make Tough Calls)
Step 1: Read the Story. Prince Hamlet overthinks every decision for so long that he gets stuck in analysis paralysis, and by the time he acts, everybody is dead.
Step 2: Find the Lesson. Gathering facts is good, but overthinking is often just an excuse to avoid making a hard choice.
Step 3: Use It in Real Life. Give a student a real case study about a leadership team that spent two full years researching a new product while a competitor stepped in and stole their market share.
The Task: The student uses Hamlet’s mistake to explain where the team got stuck and writes two simple rules the company should use next time to force a decision before it is too late.
Why Isn’t This the Universal Standard?
If the three-step loop makes sense, why isn’t every college classroom run this way? It comes down to a few common institutional challenges:
Training and Background. Most humanities professors spent years writing deep academic papers. They know their subjects inside and out, but many have not worked in corporate settings, managed civic organizations or led crisis teams. Creating workplace scenarios is simply outside their usual training.
Time and Workload. It is relatively easy to grade a multiple-choice quiz or assess a traditional essay. Building, testing and grading scenario-based assignments takes significant time and institution-wide coordination.
Academic Tradition. A long-standing viewpoint in higher education holds that studying literature or history should be done purely for its own intrinsic value. While that pursuit has merit, it often leaves departments without clear ways to show that students are gaining practical, workplace-ready skills.
The Bottom Line
A college degree should represent more than four years of classroom attendance. It should serve as reliable evidence of demonstrated capability.
While brilliant individual professors are already doing amazing work in their classrooms, higher education needs a system-wide approach. By adopting the 3-Step Learning Loop of reading the story, finding the lesson and applying it to real life, The Purpose College can give every student a general education that is practical, measurable and genuinely useful for the real world.