The cure proposed for the crisis of the humanities is worse than the disease | Hacker News Reader

The cure proposed for the crisis of the humanities is worse than the disease

chronicle.com

22 pointsnz13 comments

It is long and rambling and I took to skimming after a while.

The liberal arts are called such because they are liberating. They are freeing and empowering. They teach you how to get things done.

As a homeschooling parent, I gave my sons a humanities education defined thusly:

An education in the art of dealing with the inconvenient, inescapable fact of your own humanity and that of the people you are surrounded by.

Language, poetry, expressing yourself, dealing with your feelings and that of other people, knowing the wisdom contained in classical stories, having some background information on the foundations of the society you live in. These are some of the pieces and purpose of a humanities education aka liberal arts.

If you don't really understand what the humanities are about, reading up on The Clemente Course in Humanities is eye opening. They set out to teach humanities to poor people and found that it allowed many of them to escape poverty.

Here is their website, though I read a book about the origin story years ago:

https://clementecourse.org

While this is an interesting definition of humanities, how does it tie into the university programs discussed in the article? Do you think these programs have value, both on research and teaching fronts? Do you think their structure makes sense? Do you think your definition of humanities is reflected in the university and are you arguing for them to reflect your view of the humanities more?

Glancing at the website you linked, I can agree with some of the things they're aiming for (reasoning is a useful skill that isn't always straightforward to learn), but that's much different than figuring out how to education a populace in a rational and economic way AND balancing this with doing work worth studying in the first place.... much of which is addressed in the article.

It isn't "my" definition. It is the original definition of liberal arts:

But the liberal in liberal arts and liberal education does not stand in contrast to conservative. Rather, it derives from the Latin liberalis, associated with the meaning of freedom. Liberal, not as opposed to conservative, but as free, in contrast to imprisoned, subjugated, or incarcerated. Free citizens studied the trivium and quadrivium as part of their liberal education, as these skills were considered the ones that would enable them to function successfully as free citizens in society.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/04/...

The article refutes this definition of humanities and liberal arts and gives evidence to its refutations.

All the responses to you show how much a liberal arts education is lacking these days. I'm glad you home schooled your son. I'm sure he'll be a fine gentleman. The Clemente Course you point out is really eye opening. There's been so much doubt on "read a little Plato" and life will be better, that folks see more value in working at McDonald's. "I can make 12.50 an hour rather than waste time on Plato."

A summary of the article's thesis (in my view), since it seems most lost the patience to read it:

The humanities is a culture based around the activities of reading works, thinking deeply about these works, then constructing criticisms of these works. The humanities should not have to justify their existence. They do not exist as some wish they did to further activist ideologies or to further traditional church views. The humanities should not have to justify its existence for its secondary or tertiary qualities (cognitive benefits, discipline). The humanities have created a class of people with similar tastes and ideas, and expulsion from universities won't make the humanities go away. Humanities exist because historically people have found value in this form of inquiry and these tastes, and people will continue to find value in these activities, so the humanities will continue whether universities accept them or not.

As a sometime English major, I’m biased, but the main objective (or perhaps side-effect) of the humanities, in my experience, was to teach one how to write. Regardless of “truth,” “values,” pottery, or poetry, modular, well-structured arguments were the main thing I got from that degree. Attempts to justify the actual content of humanities studies seem futile, if valiant, and nobody has been good at articulating deeper aims for English, at least. (I found anyway that I was able to write A papers without reading the material.)

(At any rate, this author might have taken a more Orwellian pen to their monograph.)

I would think a dystopian bent on the humanities would be much worse. They only exist to hide the real sins of the sciences' use (death, destruction, greed). Yeah, there is no justification... there is no science way to prop up the humanities. But if humanities teaches you to see in new ways, then you have to acknowledge that there's a hermeneutically useful set of tools on which science got based.

An insufferable read. Just reading this makes me want to abolish the humanities...

Why was it insufferable?

The article has 50+ paragraphs, and so few of them actually direct the reader towards the main point.

What was the articles main point?

Life isn't just about doing what puts food on the table. Though, Paul Ryan and Newt Gingrich would like us to think that.

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