Challenges to the humanities.

MOST ACADEMIC disciplines were born as philosophy and now seem to be marching toward physics. The humanities are the disciplines that have been left behind by the exodus to number crunching, hypothesis testing, and disk driving. The humanities emphasize the old: old methods, old books, old ideas, or--as history--old events. They are being de-emphasized in schools by educators who want to keep up with the new. This collection of essays is meant to justify these hoary studies to the modern world. The essays are heartfelt, but vague. The authors are certain that the humanities are still crucial, but they don't seem to know why.

The root of the problem is that they don't know what the humanities are. The authors tend to define the humanities in the negative: The humanities are not the social sciences, the "hard" sciences, the computer sciences, or anything involving math (only a small section of history is still in the humanities), but neither are they the English department's courses on science fiction, or the life-adjustment courses in the history department. All of the essayists say that we should teach the humanities, but none ventures to tell us exactly what should be taught. None is willing to stick his neck out and say, "No one should be permitted to graduate from high school without having read Publius, or without having studied the Russian Revolution." Rather, they say, "We must have better English courses, and more history."

There are two important arguments that the essayists use again and again to justify the humanities in today's schools. The first, as stated by Paul Gagnon, is that in a world where careers change quickly, people need broad skills: "The flexibility of individual workers and of the workforce as a whole is enhanced by 'generic training,' that is, universal schooling for high levels of literacy, numeracy, and communication skills." The second, summarized by Joel Kupperman, is: "The humanities provide an effective mechanism for students to gain important insights into values."

But neither of these arguments justifies a curriculum involving great literature or history. If all one wants to teach is reading and communication skills, why teach anything besides the newspapers and inter-office memos, which are the commonest forms of communication nowadays? If one wants to raise questions about values, why not use those teen encounter-group "Value Worksheets," which address teen value problems directly?

When Patrick Welsh (one of the contributors) teaches A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to his high-school students, he tries to make it relevant to their lives:

We discussed Stephen's decision to be an artist rather than a priest in terms of their own decisions about what colleges to attend and what fields to major in. We compared the fear Stephen felt about leaving his family and country to the anxiety they feel about graduating and going off to college.

In other words, to teach this old novel it was necessary for the teacher to change it to make it seem relevant to the new. In order to teach values and communication processes, teachers feel they must declassicize the classics.

Defining themselves in opposition to the classics, advocates of the humanities tend to see themselves as interpreters of the squishy things--values and perceptions--while scientists are concerned with the hard things--fact and numbers. But the humanities have their own facts. History is not just lessons and interpretations, it is facts. One of the essays in this book acknowledges this, and, implicitly, its argument leads to a persuasive justification of the humanities in modern schools.

E. D. Hirsch gave some college students an essay about friendship and, later, asked them to summarize it. They remembered it pretty well. Then he gave them an essay comparing Robert E. Lee with U. S. Grant. The students had gone through public schools and thus knew nothing about the two generals. When they were asked to summarize the second essay, it was as if they had never read it. Next, Hirsch took a chess set and made several moves. He asked chess experts and chess novices to reproduce the moves. The experts could do it easily, but the novices could not. Then he arranged the pieces in a formation that could never occur during a chess game, moved some pieces, and asked experts and novices to reproduce the moves. This time, neither experts nor novices could do so. By these and other exercises, Hirsch demonstrated something that all of us know intuitively: When we come across information on a topic on which we are already well informed, we absorb that information easily, and remember it. When we come across information on a topic about which we know practically nothing, the information slides quickly from our minds.

From this, Hirsch identified a skill, cultural literacy, defined as knowing enough about enough subjects so that when you read a newspaper or listen to a speech you understand what is being reported, and then remember it. For example, if you don't know what I mean when I write "The Great Books," you are not culturally literate enough to read this book review.

Next Hirsch delineates a principle that persuasively refutes the two arguments that his colleagues use to justify the humanities. His principle is that knowledge is not transferable. If you learn how to dissect Critique of Pure Reason, it will not help you dissect a Soviet foreign-policy statement:

Recent work has shown that every acquired skill is knowledge-based and task-specific and cannot be transferred to a substantially different task. This means that there is no substitute in education for the specific background information I have been calling cultural literacy.

In other words, the reason Welsh's kids can' understand a Joyce novel unless it is bastardized to their culture is that they've never been taught the facts about Joyce's culture. Similarly, a person can't understand a newspaper story about Gorbachev unless he knows the facts about Czarism, Marxism, and the Russian Revolution. The culturally illiterate person will transpose Grobachev to his familiar American culture and will ascribe to him familiar American characteristics.

At least, Hirsch provides an interesting challenge to the easygoing culture-vulturism of some of his co-contributors. At best, he offers an argument that both defines and justifies the humanities in the classroom: The humanities teach the facts (and thus, the values) required for broad cultural literacy. The facts allow students to appreciate the differences between cultures and eras. Ignorance of the facts means that the student must squeeze all literature and all history into his own small world.