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A pretty good summa of the humanities
Here’s about as good of an argument in defense of teaching the humanities and the liberal arts in high school and college as I could imagine:
At one time the purpose of a university education was to give future leaders an opportunity — before they shouldered the dull burdens of civic responsibility — to explore the purpose and value of life. By instilling a strong sense of history, of reason, of logic, of the best of what has been thought and said, a background in the Humanities would prepare a young scholar for whatever may lie ahead.
This, at least, had been the belief going back to Plato’s Republic.
Notice that this defense of the humanities doesn’t preclude specialized and technical training in everything from the sciences to computer programming to land surveying. The teaching of those things is absolutely fundamental to the past and present flourishing of Western Civilization and the General Redemption of Creation. The years of high school and college should be, though, in some sense, about providing the philosophical foundations for labor, life, and work. But high schools and colleges don’t teach students about philosophical foundations anymore, unless they’re Really Odd or Classical/Christian or Both.
back to top12 Comments to “A pretty good summa of the humanities”
HSK,
The quote was about university studies not High School. I might even agree with it for a well rounded aducation. I do not see how this supports your idea about high school though.
I would rather have children learn the basics of reading, writing and math up through high school and leave their brainwashing to the socialsist cause to the left’s propaghanda professionals in college
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See me and HSK get to these weird agreements/disagreements over education pedagogy.
It’s simple to me. As liberal multiculturalists succeed in making education more inclusive to plural perspectives, conservatives react with calls to get back to the three R’s. What suffers is any kind of in depth understanding of philosophical traditions. But there are unique reasons why students in the west should have more than a historical knowledge of the west’s key thinkers.
Don’t get me wrong. I believe in multicultural education. It is wrong to assume that America’s children live lives cut off from the East’s great traditions. And I think that World Civilizations is a vital educational requirement.
What I advocate is more money for education and a commitment to funding schools to the degree that they can expand elective course offerings to allow free thinking teenagers and young adults the opportunity to choose an in depth humanities course load, rich in philosophy of yes even “the west.” Kids can’t explain that Plato was a tyrant and Aristotle a misogynist if those names are not accessible to them. It takes study to do that.
I’ll also say AGAIN, that the humanities equip students with vital analytical skills that the hard sciences don’t offer. Analyzing a situation and coming to a non-arbitrary decision without the aid quantitative data, is a skill only taught outside of science and math departments. And it’s one that not everyone has. Decision making is in most cases NOT the product of the larger sum, and we are not equipping students well to make the majority of their decisions when we don’t insist on educating in the humanities.
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Luke, I agree with you, except for the money part. Schools could cut waste and bad budget decisions to pay for a beefed-up humanities program.
Oh, and except for the “tyrant” and “misogynist” part.
I know that all the math and science geeks, not to mention business adminstration people, roll their eyes at the suggestion that kids know a bit about the humanities, but they are what make all that concrete knowledge, technology and organization matter.
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Luke, I’d have to agree.
I went to a very respected engineering school, one with a very weak humanities program, and it’s only because my homeschooling parents made me do ridiculous amounts of literature/Latin/logic/history/philosophy work that I have any real ability to reason or, say, hold a political or religious discussion devoid of name-calling. Learning all the math and software engineering and business processes in the world didn’t prepare me for anything except the 9-5. And I’d like to think education is about more than getting a job.
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Luke–
I believe I’ve mentioned I was an English major (and in any case, my constant Milton references should lay the matter in no doubt.)
I loved my degree and feel I learned to think and reason and challnge ideas outside the culture I grew up in.
It always frustrated me when people looked at me and asked, “So you must want to teach?” as if a desire to teach was the only possible reason to get a degree in English.
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Luke,Luke,Luke,
The standard answer for lefties is spend more money. If that were true and that humanitarian and liberal arts make for finer students in math and the hard sciences, since the USA spends way more money on liberal humanitarian education than any nation on the planet by far, especially k-12, we should have by far the best students. Instead we have very average ones. So your premise of money and arts is what make for fine students burns up in the face of fact once again.
But of course we wouldn’t know that if we did not know the facts and know that money and teaching liberal arts have little to do with scholastic achievement. It would seem that money and humanities point to poor scholastics instead. But I’m not blaming you for not being able to figure this out.
You are the product of a socialist education that has failed horribly. It teaches flawed logic, erroneous assumptions and flawed conclusions. Sadly, you will suffer for it though.
Kimberly,
What are the reasons for making english your major if you are not going to teach it again? I majored in Architecture without having any plans of ever practicing it but this reasoning was because there were no jobs in it that paid more than flipping hamburgers
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Jacques Barzun and John Henry Cardinal Newman certainly echoed much of what HSK has to say here.
Does anyone read those dudes anymore??
And what of the premises underlying that book from a few years ago written by the gay philosopher “The Closing of the American Mind”??
Still true??
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#4 Megadittos Alissa. Folks like you should be giving the commencemt addresses!
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Ahh … Llama … happy to oblige.
I love English–its literature and beauty, and the ideas it expresses.
Shall I provide a few examples?
Dante: Be satisfied with So it is , O Man, for if you could have known the entire plan, Mary would not have had to bear a son.
Milton: I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees its adversary, but slinks out of that race in which that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.
Novalis: Unser Leben ist kein Traum, aber es soll und wird veilleicht einer werden.
MacDonald: But when I wake at last into that life which, as a mother her child, carries this life in its bosom, I shall know that I wake, and shall doubt no more. I wait; asleep or awake, I wait.
Fitzgerald: So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Eliot: I have known the mornings, evenings, afternoons; I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
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Actually, I’m going on for an M.A. so I can teach English at the university level.
But teaching English wasn’t the reason I majored in that. (That’s too practical and blase).
I used to be an English Education major, and then I switched, ’cause I wasn’t sure I wanted to teach.
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Let’s not forget that Robert Parker (great author whose literary output includes the Jess Stone novels, the fabu detective novels featuring Boston’s best gumshoe, Spenser) holds the PhD in English. (As does too, Stephen King?)
And thank you Kimberly #9 above for the splendid quotes. Superb prose within its pages was first what lead me to read NATIONAL REVIEW. Now alas the chief prose-writer/raconteur reclines with the great narrative masters of all time: the likes of Shakespeare, King David and your own beloved Milton
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Functionally, English is about story and song. In that light the so-called end of the humanities rests more in the emergence of pre-literate forms of story and song, viz. our movies/video, and our music. We still have the stories, the great thrill of those media; we still sing the songs (poetry by another name).
I would disagree with the essay at least in the snark about Obama: I think he actually represents the embrace of the liberal arts. The ability to spin words, to use words to lift up, express, define — these are the fruit of working in the humanities.
The humanities are at the end conservative: they conserve our culture by linking us with our past (”the democracy of our ancestors” as Johnson once put it): we read and speak the same words as others, and so share with them across the centuries a similar feeling. Humanities are also the tool by which we engage the forces of mediocrity and spin; we read so we can end the cant. Last, we study because it is democratic. Any one can read, any one can mine the riches of this conversation. That is its essential beauty. That is why we can not let English recede back within the ivied halls of privilege.
On that, Jacques Barzun was especially eloquent, too. (Thank you Sawgunner for the shout out).
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