This week, we’re talking about the humanities and the liberal arts education! Buckle up! It’s a good one!
The following was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Survey on American Attitudes on the Humanities
November 9, 2020
Just over half (56 percent) of Americans agree strongly with the statement that “the humanities should be an important part of every American’s education,” while 38 percent “somewhat agreed” with the statement, according to a new survey of 5,015 American adults from the Humanities Indicators Project of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
The survey found differences in attitudes across educational levels, political ideologies and gender. While 68 percent of college graduates strongly agree that the humanities should be an important part of every American’s education, just 47 percent of people without a college degree do. Liberals (70 percent) are more likely than conservatives (48 percent) to strongly agree the humanities are important. Women (60 percent) are also more likely than men (52 percent) to see the humanities as being an important part of every American’s education.
The survey also found that 78 percent of Americans wish they had taken more courses in at least one humanities-related subject in school. Nearly half (49 percent) wish they’d taken more classes in languages other than English.
Eighty-one percent of respondents said they regularly use at least one humanities-related skill in the workplace, and 29 percent of respondents said they think their career advancement has been “at least partially impaired” by a deficiency in at least one humanities-related skill.
The survey also asked Americans about their engagement with humanities-related content in their daily lives, through such activities as consumption of humanities-related video or audio programming, reading fiction and nonfiction books, researching humanities-related topics online, visiting museums, and attending poetry readings and other cultural events. While 97 percent of respondents engaged at least sometimes in at least one humanities-related activity over the last year, a majority of those surveyed did not engage in any single activity often or very often.
The following was published in the St. Cloud Times, our local newspaper:
Why we need to embrace liberal arts
This goes beyond a failure to communicate; it’s a failure of understanding.
Both sides say they value freedom, for example. But neither side is very good at articulating what their concept of freedom consists in. This is a philosophical question.
Another aspect (among many others) of this divide is between a conception of persons as independent individuals and one that sees them as fundamentally connected. This is a metaphysical issue about the nature of persons, and is also a philosophical issue. But most people have little awareness of how their conception of persons underlies their political views, or even how to think about these conceptions.
There are many more issues at the heart of our failure to understand each other, issues that lie deep in our fundamental conceptions of ourselves and our values. What makes it so hard to talk about these things? The situation was not always this way, but it has been building for a while now. How did it get this way?
It’s no accident that the increase in the rancorous political atmosphere has accompanied another change: education (particularly higher education) has increasingly tailored itself to market forces. Students don’t go to college to become educated, learn how to think, expand their horizons and deepen their appreciation of life experiences. They go to college to get a job.
There are many (good) reasons for this; the cost of college and the burden of student debt is a major factor. But I want to focus on the effects of this trend.
The liberal arts have always been the place where students learned how (not what) to think about value, about their own conceptions of themselves and others. Philosophy, literature, theater, the arts and history have all centered on these fundamental issues about human nature and how we relate to each other and the rest of the world.
As interest in these issues have eroded in favor of marketability and employability, we find ourselves increasingly at a loss about how to understand or even talk to each other about political, ethical and metaphysical issues that divide us. We have no common language in which to position different views on these issues.
Even many of the liberal arts have been forced to shoehorn themselves into a model of education that sees their value only as a path to employment. We’ve just seen the result.
The problem is not so much that we don’t agree on what freedom is (for example). The problem is that we have little awareness of what these different conceptions are or how to reason about them.
The erosion of the liberal arts has fed directly into the situation that the country finds itself in today.
Carolyn Hartz is a professor of philosophy at SCSU and a champion of the liberal arts.