Tag Archives: liberal arts

Count Yourself in as an Advocate for the Humanities

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It is a given in some schools and universities that more time should be devoted to job training, with less effort helping students build on their latent passions.

Much of the news about schools and universities is dominated by the current fashion of complaining about the “soft” and “wasteful” curriculum of the humanities and liberal arts. It is a given in some institutions that most funding and hiring should be organized around direct career-related majors, with less resources available which would help students discover their under-developed passions. One could also hope that there would be more campus-based experiences that might offer new insights that would extend beyong their inherited religious and political beliefs.

Luckily, most students still want more out of their education than “hard skills” that come with good programs in engineering, business or the sciences. Many have also had enough life experience with music, theater, film, and narrative writing to get a taste of what is possible in a full and busy life. Only later, perhaps, will they realize that these also cultivate “soft skills” that are respected by all sorts of forward-thinking organizations.

Enter the humanities of history, the fine arts, literature, philosophy, rhetoric and cultural studies. Whatever claims we can make to our own civilization rests with our willingness to engage with naturally creative and playful minds. Indeed, in the humanities creativity and innovation are essential and, when done well, will take a person far beyond what machine learning can do. As Forbe’s Benjamin Wolff notes, “Graduates in disciplines like history, literature and philosophy are comfortable with ambiguity and contested meaning; they know how to detect bias, contradictions and narrative gaps in large blocks of text….”  These are skills for critical thinking, and only the start of what is possible.

Speaking more broadly, the Atlantic’s David Brooks sees the pursuit of passions in the humanities as an enduring strength of our universities, which can channel the nascent ideals of our best students in ways that help them become more complete persons.

“Life is essentially a battle between our noblest aspirations and our natural egotism. Humanistic education prepares people for this struggle. Yes, schooling also has a practical purpose—to help students make a living and contribute to the economy. But that practical training works best when it is enmeshed within the larger process of forming a fully functioning grown-up—a person armed with knowledge, strength of judgment, force of character, and a thorough familiarity with the spiritual heritage of our civilization.”

stage lighting omnibus journalIf Brooks seems a bit abstract, many of us can sight direct paths to our life’s work through what might first seem like back doors. For example, and in a personal account I have related before, only through the forbearance of a high school drama teacher was I allowed to play a small role in the senior class play. There were so few of us in the class that all hands were needed. The truth was I was completely unconvincing even with just a few lines, but also in the ways I chose to wander around the stage seemingly without purpose. Soon I learned about “blocking” a play, and especially about the need to find a character’s motivations for their actions.

In this distracted teen a light went on. The idea of performance as a durable paradigm never left me. That insight began to grow a few years later after discovering related ideas in the language of self-presentation common to classical of sociology and literary theory. I was clearly no actor, but that moment on a high school stage was enough to shape a long career exploring the ways we relate to each other through politics, speech and movement. It started with an exceptional high school drama teacher and continued with the help of colleagues that have included medievalists, sociologists, biographers, filmmakers, political scientists, journalists, art historians, photographers and American historians.

What modes of the humanities enterprise deserve our support? My list is only suggestive, since there are wonderful specializations within each discipline:

NEH

  • Art History
  • Studio arts
  • Fiction and Nonfiction Writing
  • Journalism
  • Rhetoric, Logic and Argumentation
  • Cultural studies
  • Classical Studies
  • Media Theory and Analysis
  • American Colonial History
  • Music Theory and Performance
  • Play and Screen-writing
  • Filmmaking
  • Peformance Studies
  • Acting
  • Philosophy
  • Scenic, Lighting and Sound Design

These are mostly offshoots of the classical liberal arts that have been part of the core curriculum in the world’s universities for hundreds of years.

What You Can Do

=>Contribute to community arts organizations.

=>Attend performances and exhibitions.

=>Support live music in the community.

=>Visit and support local libraries.

=>Turn your children into avid into readers and writers.

=>Demand creative curricula that goes beyond teaching to standardized tests.

=>Help your children understand the varied cultural history of the nation.

=>Push back when friends express what was a misplaced sympathy because of your daughter’s decision to pursue a college major in philosophy. We knew better. She and I had no doubts about her coming successes. 

 

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Can We Salvage the Humanities?

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For most of us who have gained richness in our lives through direct access to music, live performance, and academic study, the inadvertent theft of these forms of engagement has been nearly total and devastating.

Though there can be no single measure of the negative effects of the pandemic on our social and intellectual intelligence, the mind reels at what the final tally will be. We are mostly missing what was once the vast array of classroom opportunities, plays, concerts, and travel that survive only in the form of video facsimiles. Of course, the first task through this pandemic is to save lives and keep individuals healthy. Even against the myopia of many slow thinkers in government, that remains true. But for those Americans whose lives were on track to be given greater meaning through live performance, academic study, and direct mentoring, the inadvertent theft of these forms of engagement has been nearly total.

The humanities—fields of inquiry ranging from history to languages to literature and the arts—thrive when open and eager minds can share the same space. It’s our birthright to be with others. For students this means being in the presence of a wonderful instructor in any field that creates insight about what is possible and what’s at stake within human communities. The humanities remind us where we have been and where aspirations made visible can still take us.

For an educator, the pinnacle of this form is perhaps the seminar: a small room shared by 10 or 12 students and an instructor, all beginning the voyage of a shared conversation about the work of a groundbreaking creator of ideas.  We may never be more connected to thoughts that matter than as a participant discussing a writer or creative force bursting with revelatory insights. There may be ways to electronically approximate a meeting of minds. But most are often more performative than enlightening. Communication works better when folks share the same space and time.

It is especially heartbreaking to imagine all of the events, meetings, lectures and performances that have not happened in the last year.  In the United States alone this list would surely be in the millions. Scale down to one organization like a modest-sized college, and it would be in the thousands.

The effects of this cultural shutdown are beginning to be evident and especially costly for the humanities. Enrollments in the nation’s community colleges has dropped at the very moment when non-college adults are at risk for chronic unemployment. More disturbingly, stretched parents are having second thoughts about spending money on any undergraduate curriculum that offers a palette of experiences larger than is required to do a single job. Their concerns are abetted by nearsighted reporting in our media, with headlines like “College Majors With The Lowest Unemployment” or “College Majors With The Worst Return On Investment.”

The pandemic-hastened conversion of a student’s education into vocational training for an employment category is now fully underway, as schools and universities close programs in writing, philosophy, performance studies, history, foreign languages, music, dance, theater, journalism and rhetoric. Never mind that they have missed the more subtle point that a degree in history or philosophy may cultivate wonderful skills needed for innovative work. Writer Julie Schumacher reminds us what her English students can accomplish: “Be reassured: the literature student has learned to inquire, to question, to interpret, to critique, to compare, to research, to argue, to sift, to analyze, to shape, to express.”

I doubt if any of us who have spent time discussing Aristotle’s pragmatism or Suzanne Langer’s insights on presentational art thought that we were wasting our student’s time. Indeed, for reasons I have mentioned before, reading Langer—a philosopher writing in the 1950s—would make any contemporary television journalist a little bit smarter. And Aristotle’s refutation of Plato’s suspicions about public opinion still gives us a clear rationale for striving to protect democratic norms.  In these times, with electoral losers brooding over dark ways to return to power, this should be a primary concern.  Indeed, we can’t afford to not have the humanities, which collectively help us imagine what a great society can ethically achieve.