According to the Times, 45 percent of the faculty members in Stanford’s main undergraduate division are clustered in the humanities, but they only teach 15 percent of the students. Harvard has seen a 20 percent drop in humanitites majors in the past ten years.
In The New Yorker in August, the writer Adam Gopnik argued for the importance of English majors. The New Republic ran an article, “Science Is Not Your Enemy,” by Steven Pinker, a Harvard cognitive scientist. A few weeks later came a testy rebuttal, “Crimes Against Humanities” by Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, rejecting Dr. Pinker’s views on the ascendancy of science.
How do we convince students that a philosophy major has value?
Apt. 11d 
The problem is, our culture–and academics are among the worst offenders in this regard–believes that natural science is “true,” and the humanities are just opinion, or the expressions of class interest, or what have you. The more idealistic a young person is, the more attracted he or she is to the possibility of discovering true knowledge.
Incidentally, there do exist critiques of natural science (definitely a feminist one, and maybe a Marxist one lurking out there somewhere), but no one takes them seriously.
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I’m not sure where you are going with this. There are very large numbers of people who criticize the natural sciences as being fundamentally incomplete from perspectives that have nothing to do with Marxism or feminism. This is mostly people acting on religious grounds, ranging all the way from the guy who thinks you need to believe the world is 6,000 years old if you love Jesus to academics who write long-winding papers using phrases like “non-overlapping magisteria,” This has got to be more common than people looking at science from a feminist or Marxist perspective and is probably more common than people looking at the humanities as being just opinion. These are taken very seriously by a great many people.
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As a humanities person (History), I wish that I had majored in something more technical as a young person (Engineering, Computer Science, Chemistry, Math, etc.) for two reasons:
(1.) It is easy for a well educated non-specialist to get a lot out of reading a historical monograph, novel, or philosophical treatise. Thus, you can read blogs, go to lectures at museums, or otherwise take part in the life of the mind in the Humanities without advanced degrees or training. It is very difficult to be an autodidact scientist.
(2.) If you start out as a Chemical Engineer and decide that you have made a big mistake, it is much easier to go back to school part time to learn to do something else. It is very difficult to go back to school part time for the sciences because of the lab requirements.
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The exception to the above I would make is foreign languages. It is hard to learn those on your own unless you are an infant, and people do benefit from studying those in a structured setting. It is a great loss to our collective culture that these departments are disapearring.
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I like the Pinker article. And, yes, there’s going to be downsizing of humanities, if the stats you suggest are correct in the bigger picture (though I don’t think majors is the correct comparison). When I talk to my kids about my degree, which is currently a vogue degree (like international studies), with all the issues associated with in vogue degrees and fields, what’s remarkable is how young the field and information are and how much more we know than we did even a short time ago. The growth in some scientific areas is going to displace other fields.
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English departments are huge. You could downsize the typical department by half and still have a large department.
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English departments are huge because there are many required English courses. We’re the largest department in our college, and we still could use a few more full-timers.
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My English degree has served me well–I’m now a lawyer in a very technical area, and I think my degree has helped me develop strategies for translating the technical material for a generalist audience. But I also had a year of Engineering classes before switching majors, so it’s possible that I’m also being served by the science classes, and not giving them enough credit.
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Incidentally, Glenn Reynolds has it right. I say with considerable confidence that the typical physics lecture does not cover “inequality and climate change.” What people want is timeless truth, not trendy left-wing politics. That’s why there are probably more Columbia students at our church every Sunday than there are English majors at Columbia.
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I am an English, Ph.D. teaching Computer Science because I worked in an IT department for years. My skills in both areas are important. What many people say to me is that my ability to communicate complex technical issues to non-technical people is what sets me apart from most techies. It also makes me a decent teacher. 🙂
I could probably build some more of my technical skills and take a more technical (and higher paying) job, but I’d probably have to start at the bottom and there might be a limit to what I’m capable of doing (at this late stage in life); however, my communication skills might be useful as a project lead or something like that, where you’re not necessarily doing the programming yourself. A lot of programming is learned on the job once you have the main ideas down. What’s important is learning to learn–and that can be taught in many disciplines.
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We’re hearing that liberal arts majors are going to be the new thing but perhaps not the “traditional” liberal arts majors. I was at a meeting where our new provost was speaking, and he was talking about how anthropology was the major that no one would ever support, but other “liberal arts” majors would be supported. We currently have 5 new programs on the table: a generalist liberal arts major, a media studies major, an applied math major, a psychology major, and a biology major. The traditional disciplines are re-forming a little.
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I think we have to examine why the liberal arts are fading as a major. It’s not because people don’t want to hear Marxist interpretations of Jane Ayre. It’s because people are FREAKED out about jobs. And rightfully so.
My kid is naturally a liberals arts type of kid. He loves his English and social studies classes. I hope that he takes lots of electives in those subjects in college. But I’m very subtly pushing him to take classes in engineering and architecture next year, so he’ll be focused on that in time for college. He has very good spacial skills, so I think he’ll like those classes. But I’m mostly making this push, because I think that he’ll have more jobs open to him in the future with a BS in engineering than a BA in modern european history. If goes to a good college and majors in History, there will be still a lot that he can do, but he’ll have more options with an engineering degree.
I’m not the only parent who thinks like this. That’s why colleges are seeing a drop in liberal arts majors.
What are colleges going to do about this? That’s another big question. Are they going to fire all the professors who teach French and anthropology to classes of five students? In another ten years, yes.
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“But I’m very subtly pushing him to take classes in engineering and architecture next year, so he’ll be focused on that in time for college.”
My cousin the newly-minted architect/structural engineer sat out of work for nearly two years after the recent crash. Engineering is scary, because timing is so important, and by the time you graduate with your degree in a hot field, there’s a glut. Choose wrong, and you’re a new structural engineer in 2008, a new petroleum engineer in 1980 something, an aerospace engineer in 1990 something or an electrical engineer in 2002.
“Are they going to fire all the professors who teach French and anthropology to classes of five students?”
Wouldn’t anthro have a lot of BIG classes? I remember being in an intro anthropology class at USC (a private school), and there were easily 100 students in the lecture. (It was a great class, and I remember everything about chimpanzee behavior, but all the fine points about fossils and dates are long gone.)
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Speaking as another parent who’s got a kid starting in sciences this year, the student has got to be hungry, really hungry for that course of study to get through it. It’s not that we coddle them in the liberal arts, but there’s a bigger mushy middle there than there is in the sciences and engineering (which have an impressive mushy A range and a bigger mushy fail range). You can get by and recover from catastrophes more easily in the liberal arts than you can in science & engineering and that’s why we’ve seen so many transfer students over the years. (Although, these days, we’re seeing more drop-outs or institutional down-shifts than ever before.)
That’s where class privilege comes into play – you and I, we have the resources to pull the utmost advantages out of the system. We advise our children how to construct useful programs of study, how to prep, how to locate and exploit all of the support systems. Most parents don’t have the advantages necessary to get their kids the help that they need and, to be certain, most students don’t!
Even so, every advantage out there isn’t always enough but, don’t worry – when your kid needs that elective, there’ll be the underpaid adjunct or the distance ed course which pays a pittance per student to give them the achievable credits they’ll need to get the rest of their degree. There are precious few of the profs teaching classes of five in French or anthro – university administrators are choking off the tenure-track lines in preference of just-in-time staffing options (as you well know). So there’ll be courses but not much of a curriculum or program. Once I retire (or die), I don’t expect my university will hire a full-timer to replace me despite the high student numbers that appear for courses in ancient, medieval and early modern history (and I say that unironically). Zombie courses will carry on depending on who can be found to teach them, though, don’t worry!
I’ve seen what that future looks like – a close friend works at another educational institution where chairs have no idea what’s really going on with their departments because they’re not full-time nor is anyone else. And every new person hired to teach is supposed to drop by the office at some point during the term to borrow a cheap video camera so someone will have a recording to check their classroom performance. There’s no sign that this is actually happening, of course. That’s institutional oversight for you! This is the brave new world of education, applied and academic. MOOCs are only a symptom and even a B.Eng. won’t save your kid from the rough ride ahead. We live in interesting times, heaven help us.
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This. Totally.
My only comment is that the brave new world isn’t confined to education. The changes in higher ed are systematic of bigger changes going on in society. I’m actually very pessimistic about where things are going.
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Yes, every system is constantly being gamed. There was a book that I read a few years back that explored the instability experienced in the 19th/early 20th century media/tech innovations: “Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture”. It’s a fabulous book because it blows away our comforting image of a stable past, replacing it with eras roiled by flux and people struggling to keep their balance as everything changed around them. Honestly, as a historian, I think that sense of living through cataclysmic change is a feature of history, not a bug of modernity.
If you think there’s stability in something, anything, you’re fooling yourself. The rich and the connected have better chances and bigger safety nets but somebody, somewhere, is putting together options that will blow comfortable routines and destroy expectations. Maybe a thousand years ago it was more an issue of living through wars, conquests and climate shifts that devastated your life and made you worried for the future which was clearly spiralling out of control but that’s not that far off from the feelings of dread and uncertainty we experience today.
Apocalypse Then or Apocalypse Now? Apocalypse Always.
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I like Apocalypse Always. Would be good on a t-shirt. I agree that moments of stability are far less frequent than we imagine them to be in our fantasy.
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“..It’s not because people don’t want to hear Marxist interpretations of Jane Ayre. It’s because people are FREAKED out about jobs…”
I don’t think we have to choose. Marxist interpretations of Jane Ayre get damned tedious – my #2 can get quite pungent about the coercive correctness in his high school classes, I expect he will be even grouchier by the time he is in college. Jobs make us all nervous, Laura you have enriched my discourse with the phrase ‘middle class panic’. So these two things both push in the same direction, which is across campus away from the Sociology Department and towards Applied Math.
I do kind of think English, real English, careful reading of literature to discern meaning and character development is exciting, the attraction is enduring, and it fits you to function well in a job. Being hectored about the general vileness of men, and the Koch brothers in particular – Hell, you get eight classes in a year, for your $60000, do you really want that $7500 worth? Didn’t think so.
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“I do kind of think English, real English, careful reading of literature to discern meaning and character development is exciting, the attraction is enduring, and it fits you to function well in a job. Being hectored about the general vileness of men”
When Hawthorne or Melville talk about the general vileness of men, it’s “meaning and character development,” but when women do it, it’s hectoring. Got it.
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Hawthorne, Melville, and Bronte are all unreadably dull. They’re worse than Russian novels where everybody takes a break from the plot to talk about God for 70 pages. Maybe that’s why all the English majors go to law school. They have developed a tolerance for ploughing through the unreadable.
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What’s funny is that I’m teaching Much Ado About Nothing for the next few weeks, and if ever there was a classic work that argues that men are generally vile, this is it. Seriously, is there a man in this play with any redeeming value whatsoever? It’s no wonder Beatrice says at the beginning of the play that she’s never getting married.
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MH, I have to agree. But you didn’t mention Cooper. I *always* think any book is better than the movie, except for Last of the Mohicans. I could make a version of LotM using my gerbils as my cast, and it would still be better than the book.
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Nobody ever made me read Cooper.
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Send them a thank-you card.
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That would be 7.1 billion cards to write, plus the heirs of deceased people who didn’t make me read Cooper.
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Read Twain on Cooper and be done with it.
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tow minutes after I wrote the above, I went to the Walter Russel Mead blog, and he said everything I said, but much better. I could just give up and farm out my opinions to him…
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/11/01/students-tuning-out-humanities-professors/
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What dave s. (and Walter Russel Mead) said. The money quote is:
“Learning how to learn, how to communicate ideas effectively, how to assess complex situations and develop good strategies for addressing them, and strengthening your character and spiritual life: these are all more vital than ever before in the 21st century. 20th century French literary criticism, faddish race class and gender curriculums, jihads against the tradition canon because there are too many DWEMs (Dead White European Males) in it: those are less useful.”
That’s why it is so disturbing to me that Andrew Delbanco, whom I generally respect, intellectually, would suggest that what the humanities need is more political correctness, as opposed to what Delbanco generally offers in his books, which is insightful historical analysis.
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It depends on what you mean by “political correctness.” Including just any random figure from history in a curriculum simply because they are female, oppressed, African American, or whatever – fine, don’t do that. But that’s not what good academics do; we do serious historical work to identify what people other than white males said and did. Their words and actions were likely viewed as uninteresting or unimportant, so they were unrecorded or unpublished, and you really have to ferret them out sometimes. The view that most valuable ideas came from white European males, and that what they said and did is more interesting and likely to lead to “strengthening your character and spiritual life,” can only survive if those are the only people you read.
(That said, I’m no fan of French literary criticism – but quite a bit of that was done by white European males too!)
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“Seriously, is there a man in this play {Much Ado}with any redeeming value whatsoever?
Dogberry. Definitely Dogberry.
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If it pleases your worship.
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I think all humanities – Marxist interpretations included — are useful. But most people don’t think any of it is useful.
Parents aren’t pushing kids to major in Humanities, because they are scared stiff.
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Useful can come in many flavors: helpful in getting hired. Helpful in hearing “if you like your health plan, you can keep it” and thinking you are being hornswoggled. Helpful in performing well while on the job, and getting promoted after entering an organization. Helpful in getting that cute young woman/gent in class to think you are interesting, and maybe worth a life together. Helpful in making sense of a confusing world. Helpful in drawing lessons from the past. Helpful in looking at a Mary Kay meeting and thinking THIS IS A PYRAMID SCHEME AND THESE ARE NOT MY FRIENDS. Your boss might mention Trofim Lysenko, or Alger Hiss, or Gilbert Grosvenor, or Vidkun Quisling – can you tell who they were? I mean, besides DWEMs,,,
That’s what I want college to do for my kids. I don’t care about Foucault, at all.
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Well if you want to be snotty about it, I know that Grosvenor is a DWAM, not a European one.
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“Your boss might mention Trofim Lysenko, or Alger Hiss, or Gilbert Grosvenor, or Vidkun Quisling”
Or your boss might mention Anna Julia Cooper, Winnifred Eaton, or Arnold Anderson. Or even Foucault. What’s your point?
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Wendy, my point is that there were people who mattered at the time, and whose lives still echo. I had no idea of Anna Cooper or Winnifred Eaton. I have now googled them – they were people with mid-level importance, if that, who are now being eagerly grafted onto the history which I guess our kids are being asked to ingest. If you want female figures who actually mattered, how about Claire Booth Luce, or Anna Chennault? The Soong sisters? I’d like to avoid my kids being gavaged with feel-good pap about people who didn’t have much import at the time and whose retrospective careers feed current fashions.
But, yes, I guess I think my kids should hear about Foucault, he was important in intellectual history. Maybe one class worth, not a semester.
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“who mattered at the time, and whose lives still echo”
To you. To others they do not, and Cooper, Eaton, and Anderson do.
Listen, you get to choose what’s important to you, of course. But don’t presume to speak for everyone about who or what is.
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I think Harvard and Stanford are bad examples to choose, if one really wants to judge the status of the humanities. Both universities will draw many students who have heard of their strong STEM departments. If humanities enrollments are falling at Harvard and Stanford, in particular, that tells me little of the state of the study of humanities in general.
To illustrate the point, Harvard had 67 English majors graduate in 2012. Williams had 56. At 1/5 the size of Harvard, you’re more likely to run into an English major at Williams than Harvard. Harvard had 153 history majors; Williams, 59. Again, the humanities’ presence is stronger at Williams than Harvard.
Prestige doesn’t automatically mean a university is the best at everything.
I have been taken aback by how little many students know about history and the world. It seems students are encouraged to “double up” in math or science, but not in the humanities in high school.
I find it wrong that students at our local public high school perceive the students likely to major in STEM fields in college to be “the smart ones.” People have different talents. I think students should follow their strongest talents. Some students have the potential to be marvelous high school teachers, but mediocre engineers. (or lawyers, etc.) Our culture is becoming more specialized. That means there are more niches. Aim for a niche which fits your natural skill set.
I am working through Tyler Cowen’s _Average is Over_. He predicts certain fields will profit in the coming century. One of those fields is marketing.
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That’s kind of weird about marketing because our marketing faculty are freaking out about losing majors. I’m not so sure it’s growing as a field. Instead, *everyone* has to learn marketing– it will be a basic skill.
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“Instead, *everyone* has to learn marketing– it will be a basic skill.”
I think that’s a very good approach.
Wendy, have you thought of writing Craigslist ads as a class exercise?
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Many things are in the eye of the beholder, no doubt. Still, I thought it was unfortunate that my daughter graduated from high school having heard of Amelia Earhart, but not Wilbur and Orville Wright.
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Our generation might have known more about the world due to the Cold War. We had US News and World Report, Time magazine, and we didn’t have the internet. There wasn’t pressure to remain juvenile forever. We wanted to be adults.
We discuss current events and history at dinner. We’ve never sheltered our children from the facts of life, although we didn’t go into detail about the bloody facts of history when the children were young. As a result our children know more about the world than many of their peers–although I think they’d have been average in their knowledge of current events thirty years ago.
I do think of a passage in Tom Wolfe’s _I am Charlotte Simmons_, of the liberal arts being for free men. Slaves could learn math, engineering and such because it made them useful to their masters, but they were not to learn the art of persuasion. The world isn’t run by engineers; it’s run by humanities majors. Why is there such an enormous push to STEM?
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Yee Haw! Walter Russel Mead just gave a post to Cass Sunstein’s piece on Alger Hiss: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/11/02/is-the-tea-party-really-all-about-alger-hiss/#disqus_thread. I really could outsource most of my opinions to that guy, lately.
Wendy, I think those who “presume to speak for everyone about who or what is” are the Gramscian Long Marchers Through The Institutions who are trying to make history serve their present agendas. I think my kids know about Earhart, and not Wright – I am going to try and redress this, and to do my level god-damned best to warn them about the Gramscians they will be taught by in college.
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“Whether they’re taught how to learn about the role a person played in history by talking Tensing Norgay as well as Edmund HIllary.”
was supposed to mean that they can learn how to learn about a person using Norgay or Hillary as an example.
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“the Gramscian Long Marchers Through The Institutions who are trying to make history serve their present agendas.”
When have historians *not* tried to make history serve their present agendas?
You see history as cultural literacy instead of as a discipline that encourages critical thinking and depth of understanding. I think that’s the real problem here.
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Wendy, you said “You see history as cultural literacy instead of as a discipline that encourages critical thinking and depth of understanding”
I certainly see cultural literacy as important. But critical thinking and depth are ill served by looking backwards and pretending minor leaguers into the majors. One of my best profs in grad school was a guy named Ernest May who gave a course called Uses of History. He talked a lot about Truman, and his assumption that Korea was like Manchuria. His view was that history can be useful as a guide, but you need to think very carefully about what is similar and what is not. You don’t get that by feel-good posthumous polishing of the careers of people who had little weight at the time.
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dave s.,
There’s also the case of women who were a big deal at the time, but whose reputations have faded over the years. There were a lot of late 19th century/early 20th century women authors who fall into this category. (I am a huge E. Nesbit fan.)
By the way, I’d like to add another example to your list: Amelia Earhart. I thought it was funny (in a morbid way) that she was prominently featured at a maps and navigation travelling exhibit we went to a few years back. Who thought it was a good idea to elevate as a role model for girls an aviator whose most famous achievement was getting lost in the most permanent possible way?
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Maybe she learned about the Wright brothers but remembered Amelia Earhart. I read a lot of books as a kid, but the biographies I remember best were Clara Barton, Girl Nurse, and Catherine the Great, Empress of All Russia. The Clara Barton book was one of only a few about women in my grandmother’s basement – a whole shelf-ful of orange biographies of famous people. Man, I loved that book.
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My kids definitely know about Wright and Earhart and Lindbergh and a lot of other people. And what they learn in school is only a small part of what they know. What the school does a good job of teaching is teaching them how to find out about people they are interested in, and I have seen the kids use that learning to learn about Fibonacci, Tensing Norgay, Nellie Bly, as well as Lyndon Johnson, Einstein, Edmund Hillary, and the rest. Whether they’re taught how to learn about the role a person played in history by talking Tensing Norgay as well as Edmund HIllary.
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When I was a kid in the 1970s, I used to go to the library and pick out books to read (in addition to the gajillion I read at home), and I’d find myself *loving* the biographies, in particular the biographies of women. There was one series in particular, and “a whole shelf-ful of orange biographies of famous people” sounds kind of familiar. I read all the ones about women, including Clara Barton :), Dorothea Dix, Nellie Bly, Jane Addams, and several about First Ladies like Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Dolly Madison, and Rachel Jackson. But my favorite was about, of all people, Jessie Fremont. This *might* have been the Jessie Fremont book I loved: http://www.amazon.com/Jessie-Fremont-Capitol-Childhood-Americans/dp/0672500922/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1383438372&sr=1-5
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Wendy,
I remember loving those biographies as an intermediate schooler (there was a big set at the library), and there were lots of good ones about women.
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I don’t think the push to STEM, for careerist reasons, will, ultimately help a student. I do think that children fall into ruts about the opportunities around them — and a child living in a house where the topics of discussion are political parties and German history (among other subjects, I’m sure) might benefit from exposure to other fields of study, just like the child in a family where physics and physiology or the topics of discussion might benefit from being exposed to marketing, among other things.
But, I don’t think that in this changing world there is any particular path, especially if chosen in independence of ones own strengths, interests, and passions that will guarantee a secure future.
“Aim for a niche which fits your natural skill set.” seems like good advice, except that you also have to be prepared to make the niche, find a new niche, flex your talents to make them fit the niche that exists.
In practice, what this means in our family is that we emphasizes developing weaknesses (talking to strangers, for example) and resilience and flexibility rather than guiding towards a particular field of study.
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Our big kids are relatively young (8 and 11), but we (i.e. primarily my husband) have tried to develop a lot of overlapping and intersecting talents and interests: reading, math, academic contests, robotics, drawing, painting, hand sewing, embroidery, machine sewing, weaving, cooking, cake decorating (my oldest did a very fair job frosting her baby sister’s 1st birthday cake last month), woodworking, amateur astronomy, archery, blow darts, stomp rockets, origami, other paper crafts, How It’s Made, The Secret Life of Machines, various documentaries, etc. We haven’t done anything at great depth at this point, but it’s been fun to dabble.
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“I don’t think the push to STEM, for careerist reasons, will, ultimately help a student.”
I think STEM is just so hard and so competitive that the students who are meh about it (as well as many who love it, but aren’t quite good enough) are quickly sifted out.
Plus, do any of us want a doctor or dentist or pharmacist whose heart isn’t really in it?
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Maybe my daughter’s teachers learned about the Wright brothers but remembered Amelia Earhart. Or maybe they chose to forget the Wright brothers.
It is entirely possible to have an academic culture that has nothing much to do with anything outside itself. For example (HT: C.S. Lewis), the self-governing city-states of the ancient world developed an art of rhetoric. This art continued to play a prominent part in education throughout the Middle Ages, despite its complete irrelevance to medieval politics. Thousands of scholars studied rhetoric before going off to careers as clerks where they never made a public speech during their entire adult lives. It may be that our children will grow up knowing a history that has no correlation with either the experiential reality of the people they study or with their own social reality.
It’s not “the past as it was,” nor much of a guide to contemporary understanding, but those ideals were the constructs of a particular place and time.
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Honestly, if an adult, American-educated student really doesn’t know about the Wright brothers, I can think of many other people to blame than the teachers.
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“You see history as cultural literacy instead of as a discipline that encourages critical thinking and depth of understanding. I think that’s the real problem here.”
Wow, I would have seen the issue the other way around. Obviously, cultural literacy (which we will define as being able to follow an erudite, allusive conversation at a Park Avenue cocktail party, or a [Hyde Park] Quadrangle Club dinner) is culturally defined, and has no objective reality. If your culture believes that Harriet Tubman is more important than Charles Sumner, then she is more important, in terms of cultural literacy. The contrary argument would be that the activities of those with real political power are in fact more important, for purposes of determining what happened in the past and why, than the activities of those whose race and gender suit the agenda of some current academic.
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Well, I was replying to dave, and he certainly seems to see history as ticking off a list of items you need to know in order to be “educated.”
“Those with real political power”–well, that’s almost always going to be white men, so it’s going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Of course, then, if you look at who was more important and had more political power in the 1850s-1860s, Melville or Stowe, the answer is going to clearly be Stowe, which makes one wonder why Melville is considered more “canonical.” Stowe was far more popular, more respected, and much more influential.
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Mary Baker Eddy! Madame CJ Walker! Ellen G. White! Melville probly a better writer than HB Stowe, in terms of character development etc. Uncle Tom kind of cardboard, but mattered. I have no brief for discarding Stowe from intellectual history, she mattered and matters still. Lurleen Wallace, there’s a name to conjure with.
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Here’s the thing: history is not just about “the activities of those with real political power,” and “what happened in the past” includes the experiences of people without political power, and these people may even have something to do with why things, both large and small, happened. Otherwise, sure, why bother to study slaves or women or illiterate people or poor people? Why look at the experience of the foot soldier when you have a great study of the general? Why look at what the non-voting wife does or thinks if you have all this information about her voting husband? Why look at a factory worker when you have an excellent biography of the company president?
One of my favorite recent reads was The Warmth of Other Suns, about the migration of African Americans to the north and west during the early to mid 20th century. No presidents or generals studied, just a fantastic, detailed study of ordinary people. What’s more valuable, that or a biography of Truman? It’s both/and, not one or the other.
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Amen.
A dominant culture assumes that they are the “norm” in terms of history/experience/values/how to live. They hire themselves, write history about themselves, read each other’s books, analyse/teach each other’s philosophical theories, etc. Also assume that any successes are due solely/primarily to their own talent/hardwork rather than any privilege. And have difficulty accepting that a subordinate group member could have something to offer.
No wonder (sadly) so many people were turned off from learning history in the past when it was primarily dates of battles and lives of conquerors.
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Hm, I’m realizing that there’s actually a contradiction in the anti-academia arguments being offered in this thread and others. On the one hand, we are to believe that most college courses are being taught by overworked adjuncts, but on the other, we are to believe that most college courses are being taught by full-time tenured faculty with an ideological axe to grind.
Just pointing that out.
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Why do I hafta choose? Overworked adjuncts may themselves have axes to grind, or they can see their path to eating going through a parlous path on which they are safer if they conform to the views of the tenured.
But, I’m not anti-academy. I want to give my kids a chance to hear a variety of voices, and I see the academy as having been captured by the Gramscian Long Marchers. I will not send them to Brown or Duke, that’s a start. I think the college experience is swell, and it is better if the profs don’t march in lock step.
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I know nothing about Brown, except that Gordon Gee didn’t last there, but I worked at Duke. That’s an absurd characterization of the place.
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Forgive me, but debating Melville vs. Stowe is like comparing white pine to red pine in the midst of a forest fire. History hasn’t been taught as only dates for more than 40 years.
Whether or not students know of any particular historical figure is not as important as whether they can place the Civil War in the correct century. The First World War. The Second World War. The Korean War. The Vietnam War. The Cold War. The Great Depression. The Industrial Revolution. Which century, which countries, major figures involved.
There’s a viral video going around in which a woman interviews college students in Pennsylvania about the Holocaust. Many of the students don’t know much about it. She is trying to get a law passed to make lessons about he Holocaust mandatory in Pennsylvania. http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/10/16/the-incredibly-depressing-answers-college-students-gave-when-asked-what-the-holocaust-was-and-where-it-began/
Surveys have shown many people 18-24 can’t find Ohio or Iraq on a map: http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/05/02/geog.test/.
If students don’t arrive at college with a basic knowledge of world history, they will find history more challenging than it was for earlier generations. If you can’t find it on a map, and don’t know when it happened, what happened before and what came after, you don’t even know if you might like to learn about it. If they haven’t written extended essays in high school, they are not likely to sign up for majors which require long papers (English, History, Philosophy, etc.) Will Fitzhugh at the Concord Review has been writing for years about the need for students to learn to write research papers in high school.
If they aren’t comfortable reading longer, nonfiction books, they’re not likely to choose majors which require reading.
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I end up teaching a little history in my lit classes (I’m sort of a new historicist, whatever that means any more), and it is kind of depressing what college students don’t know.
That said, both my kids knew who the Wright Brothers *and* Amelia Earhart are. E is a vacuum for all sorts of useful and useless knowledge, so he just retrieved it from the database that is his brain. I asked S how she knew about AE and she said “Night at the Museum.” LOL. And then she reminded us that she saw the actual Wright Brothers plane at some museum we went to, possibly the History of Flight museum near Seattle or the Smithsonian. At that point, E said, “When we used to go places.” And my husband and I said in unison, “We WANT to go places with you but you guys won’t go.” And S changed the topic real quick because she now thinks travelling with parents is Not Cool.
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As far as I’m concerned, this “gotcha” content game is the same as the “gotcha” game the congresscritters like to play with grants: totally irrelevant to the real debates about education.
I’m especially prone to this point of view, ’cause whatever gotcha’s there are about history or culture, *I* inevitably believe they are trumped by the utter lack of knowledge about fundamentals of science and math, even among those who imagine themselves to be well-educated (on any political end of the spectrum). That does not, incidentally, mean that I think my gotcha’s are better than yours, but I’m pretty sure I have a bunch.
I know all of the specifics in cranberry’s gotcha’s, but didn’t know who the anti-slavery senator y81 mentions was until I googled him, but how many of you can calculate the perimeter of a right triangle with the segments adjacent to the right angle of 2 & 3, and the integral of e^x (or its derivative). As our body of knowledge becomes more complex the consensus on what constitutes a core is always going to be controversial, and the solution can’t be to use the core from a 100 years go, or to expand the core to include everything that has ever happen.
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” integral of e^x (or its derivative)”
Why do I need to know this? I learned it, but I never used it again (or was never taught how to use it, just to know it to take AP Calc. Or something).
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First, ’cause it’s beautiful and magical. Second, because exponential functions come up all the time (population growth, compounding interest, climate models . . . .). Third, because knowledge of that tidbit usually reflects an understanding of math that will be used repeatedly among those who do understand it.
But, my point was, that it is just another gotcha, and I am deeply wary of any such reports, especially since the usual result of such a debate (oh my, no one knows where Iraq is) is only a brief symptom of a bigger problem (if one exists) or an irrelevant reflection of the fact that human knowledge is broad. If the person who doesn’t know where iraq is does know where all the south american countries are, is that OK? Or are we talking about the fact that people generally don’t know geography?
On Geekymom’s blog, a commenter — from GasStationWithoutPumps, said that a rule of thumb might be that a subject/class should be required only if it’s going to be a “prerequisite” for future learning (or something along those lines). I wonder what the core knowledge would be using such a criterion. Having studied a young field deeply, I’m generally not invested in any specific content knowledge.
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And, yes, the teaching of math as a series of seemingly irrelevant rules that are forgotten immediately after a test is the same problem as teaching a series of maps, capitals, or other content that is forgotten immediately because of it’s perceived irrelevance.
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http://m.mg.co.za/index.php?view=article&urlid=2013-11-01-universities-head-for-extinction&views=1&mobi=true&KEY=9in76ctrr9me9ebk6ks3daf6i4#.UnigrpQWub_
(apologies for the unwieldy link)
“There is nothing wrong with arguing that a good humanistic education will produce graduates who are critically literate, by some definition of critical literacy. However, the claim that only the full apparatus of a humanistic education can produce critical literacy seems to me hard to sustain, since it is always open to the objection: if critical literacy is just a skill or set of skills, why not just teach the skill itself? Would that not be simpler, and cheaper too?
I could not be more strongly on your side in your defence of the humanities and of the university as the home of free enquiry. I respect your basic approach, which, as I see it, is to mount a strategic defence of academic freedom, the kind of defence that stands a chance of swaying the relevant decision-makers, as opposed to a quixotic defence that can be easily brushed aside.
But in the end, I believe, you will have to make a stand. You will have to say: we need free enquiry because freedom of thought is good in itself. We need institutions where teachers and students can pursue unconstrained the life of the mind because such institutions are, in ways that are difficult to pin down, good for all of us: good for the individual and good for society.”
-JM Coetzee
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“Of course, then, if you look at who was more important and had more political power in the 1850s-1860s, Melville or Stowe, the answer is going to clearly be Stowe, which makes one wonder why Melville is considered more “canonical.” Stowe was far more popular, more respected, and much more influential.”
I would think that in a class on 19th-century American history, a well-designed syllabus would give a lot more attention to Stowe than to Melville. However, I believe Melville is considered literarily superior, so presumably an English class might devote more attention to him. I don’t really know enough about imaginative prose, of any time or place, to have my own opinion.
——-
“history is not just about “the activities of those with real political power,” and “what happened in the past” includes the experiences of people without political power, and these people may even have something to do with why things, both large and small, happened.”
Agreed, but that’s not an argument for finding female celebrities of minor historical significance and valorizing them. It’s an argument for studying the daily lives of women who weren’t minor celebrities, whom no one ever heard of. A good example is Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s “The Age of Homespun.” Maybe high school curricula should include more books of that nature. I would have been perfectly happy if my daughter knew more about the history of the loom and the plow.
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There is a cool interactive chart here:
http://benschmidt.org/Degrees/
This data representation tries to show that the real drop off for humanities majors was in the 1970s and that things have in fact been holding steady for humanities majors for the past 20 years.
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Great chart!
Limiting the results to Harvard, the change seems to come down to how one defines “Humanities.” English has about halved, but Economics has doubled. Sociology and “Social Sciences, other” took a huge hit in the 70s. I don’t see a huge shift from English to Computer Science. From English to Economics or Psychology, maybe.
How many “gotchas” does it take to build ignorance? None of us know everything. On the other hand, there is a level of lack of knowledge which makes one vulnerable. If I don’t know what a perpetual motion machine is, I’m more likely to buy one. If I don’t know how the banking system works, I’m more likely to reply to an email sent from the close friend of a dictator’s widow.
It’s wonderful if a student who loves building things finds his talents rewarded in school and the marketplace. It’s not so wonderful if he signs away the rights to an invention, because he doesn’t value lawyers. Nor is it wonderful if he can’t describe his invention in terms potential investors can understand.
Any recommendations for history podcast series, useful for long car trips?
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cool chart.
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Cool project, too, and one that shows how the world changes, since the author’s specialty seems to be a techy infiltration into looking at humanities data (which, incidentally, requires knowing the humanities as well as programming in their D3 data manipulation interface).
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Pretty! This has been an extremely wonderful post. Many thanks for providing these details.
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