Reclaiming the Humanities: Education Beyond Career Training

Commentary

Mr. Heller explores the state of affairs in humanities programs in an evenhanded way, analyzing various factors and positing various explanations for the demise of these once-prized programs of study. These factors include student concerns over career outlook if they get a humanities degree; an overall societal decline in reading and literacy, due largely to technology; loss of funding for humanities departments and projects; a growing sense of the irrelevancy of the humanities compared to their “rigorous” science counterparts; and student dissatisfaction with the content and methods of these courses. Much of Mr. Heller’s examination looks sound, but I’d like to offer an elaboration on some points that he touches on in passing.

The humanities crisis turns on a misunderstanding of what education is really for. Most modern universities have adopted one or both of two insufficient understandings of education: that it is merely for career training or that it is for political indoctrination. The mystery of the collapse of interest in the humanities is no mystery at all when it becomes clear that we are misusing the humanities. A snow shovel isn’t going to sell very well if it’s being marketed as a tool to chop wood.

Let’s take the question of career training first. Of course a college education must take into account career. We have bodies to be clothed and fed, after all. But we also have souls, which a pragmatic approach to education tends to forget.

A true education takes into account the whole human being, not merely his material needs. Mr. Heller interviews several students who veered away from an English major for fear that they wouldn’t make any money with it. This reflects a prevailing mindset of students—and often faculty and staff as well—who think the purpose of college is simply to get a good job. The university is a kind of complicated vending machine: put in the cash and the time, and it will eventually kick out a tasty, marketable degree with which you can provide for yourself comfortably. Get in, get out, get on with your life.

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Humanities degrees, incidentally, do provide you with marketable skills (communication, analytical thinking, people skills, etc.). But students are generally correct that they’ll make more money in a STEM field. This is an economic symptom of society’s devaluation of the arts and humanities, and the universities’ emphasis on their shiny new labs and workshops is ultimately a reflection of market pressures outside the walls of the school. We place monetary value on studies and skills that produce tangible and quantifiable products: a self-driving car; a new drug; a more high-powered cellphone.

Since the arts and humanities shape primarily the human character itself, there are no tangible products—at least, not right away. And so there’s no economic value that we can easily quantify. “Give me more engineers,” says the economy. “What use to me are these besotted and bespectacled poets and painters, busy refining their own imaginations, emotions, and wills?” So the university puts its funding toward the new computer lab, and the students, who have bought into an economic educational model, flock to it.

“[The humanities’] intrinsic importance is so great that their champions … are of course correct in insisting that they are necessary rather than nice. Poetry, story, and speculation are more than pleasant to encounter; they are indispensable if we would know ourselves as men. To live with Herodotus, Euripides, Aristotle, Lucretius, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Pascal, Swift, Balzac, Dickens, or Tolstoy—to take only a few names at random and to add no musicians, painters, or sculptors—is to be wiser than experience can make us in those deep matters that have most closely to do with family, friends, rulers, and whatever gods there be. To live with them is indeed experience of the essential kind, since it takes us beyond the local and the accidental, at the same moment that it lets us know how uniquely valuable a place and a time can be.”

Clearly, then, the humanities are to be studied for their own sake, for the way that they open our eyes to universal truths.