Easy? You must be new here.

Yes, social training is a dumb reason to include humanities (who is to say that humanities students are any better?), but there are reasons why it is a good idea to have at least a couple of compulsory humanities papers per science degree. My reason (personal and specific, I know) is that I have a broad range of interests,and, while I wished to develop a career in science and technology, and have a biomedical degree to show for it, I was also very interested in history, languages, and philosophy. In high school, I was unable to take these, as to get into my require course I had to fill my schedule with maths and science. However, my university course required you to take one non-science paper per year for the first two years (sadly limited to choice, however, as there were many clashes between my science classes and the classes I wanted to take). This way I was able to take basic philosophy and swedish, which, while maybe not directly useful to my career, did help develop me as a person, and give me more to think and talk about in depth than just science.

My theory as to the reason people don't help socially inept people when they do help with topics like maths or history or whatever, is that it is obvious if you don't know that stuff - there is no way or reason to hide your lack of knowledge. However, when it comes to social situations (speaking from my own past experience now), sometimes while one does know the answer, one is too shy or too afraid of mocking to act correctly. Now that I am (somewhat) more socially capable (it took me a while to build up guts etc), I don't help others who are making the same mistakes, as I know that had someone come up to me and told me what to do, I would have felt patronised and even worse than I did already, because I already knew what to do.

The problem here is, of course, what if the person has no idea what to do and would really appreciate the help?

So - nice people don't like to be patronising, and not-nice people don't care. One solution could be to go up to a nice, somewhat nerdy but socially adept person and ask them to help you - they may know what you are going through but didn't want to hurt your feelings...

The way I see it is that this class, while quite silly, really (especially at a masters level - maybe as a highschool option or something), is just another choice in the broad education options available. If people want to learn how to flirt, they can take this class. If they think it is beneath them or that it is unimportant, they can skip it. Same with maths or science.

Neither class is compulsory.