Justification is always a mug’s game, for it involves a surrender to some measure or criterion external to the humanities. The person or persons who ask us as academic humanists to justify what we do is asking us to justify what we do in his terms, not ours. Once we pick up that challenge, we have lost the game, because we are playing on the other guy’s court, where all the advantage and all of the relevant arguments and standards of evidence are his. The justification of the humanities is not only an impossible task but an unworthy one, because to engage in it is to acknowledge, if only implicitly, that the humanities cannot stand on their own and do not on their own have an independent value. Of course the assertion of an independent value and the refusal to attach that value to any external good bring us back to the public-relations question: How are we going to sell this? The answer is. again, that we can’t.
In The Theory of Education in the United States, written in the 1930s, Albert Jay Nock had already noted that colleges and universities were being changed from educational institutions to training schools. Education, he noted, has to do with the formation of character, not with the making of a living. He also noted that you can train just about anybody to do something.
While the writer's sentiments are admirable, the reality of humanities studies in the university today points to why so many people now wish to study vocational subjects. See this for example.
ReplyDeleteYes, that reality would turn most sensible in another direction.
DeleteWhen we grew up, my father placed great virtue in learning the practical, not the humanities or art. It was to my own loss I think, because my kids have rocketed towards the arts. And practicality has its place not doubt but so does creation.
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