Two articles published this week should make us bemoan anew the continuing decline of the humanities in prestige and popularity, on college campuses and beyond.
We are creating entire generations of ill-educated adults who devalue of what one author has called “the really human things,” and who are monumentally ignorant of history and civics. In sum, we are producing bad citizens.
The first article, published at Campus Reform on Feb. 12, involved a very particular place and circumstance, but it serves as a proxy for occurrences nationwide. The presidents of the University of South Dakota and South Dakota State University are fighting against a bill pending in their state’s House of Representatives that would make courses in U.S. History and U.S. Government, along with passage of a “citizenship test,” a requirement for graduation from state-funded colleges.
“According to the bill,” reported Campus Reform, “the citizenship test could be taken at any point throughout a student’s college career and there is no limit to how many times a student can take the test. The bill also effectively removes ‘free speech zones’ by making all outdoor areas at public institutions ‘public forums.’ If passed, the bill could also prevent harassment against ideological, political, or religious student organizations by the university.”
But the university presidents object, claiming financial concerns. The chairman of the South Dakota College Republicans disputes that forcefully, saying the law gives enough flexibility that it should not add to the budget. Moreover, it all seems a matter of priorities: The graduation requirements for South Dakota State University, for example, include 6 credits in Social Sciences/Diversity, six credits in Humanities and Arts/Diversity, and three credits in “Cultural Awareness and Social and Environmental Responsibility.”
Among the “learning outcomes” required for the Cultural Awareness credits are “Engage in aesthetic experience in order to understand artistic expression and to learn how meaning emerges from the cultural contexts of both artist and audience,” and “Explain the ethical consequences of decisions and actions concerning the environment to strengthen commitment to local, national, and global citizenship.”
So the university president is fine with requiring something as amorphous as “aesthetic experience,” but not with requiring American government or history. Therein lies the problem.
To explain why it’s part of a much bigger problem, consider a lengthy Feb. 13 column called “Twilight of the Humanities” by Gilbert Sewall in The American Conservative. Sewall laments the precipitous decline in recent decades at “both selective and non-selective schools” in the number of students studying the humanities.
Part of the problem, he says, is that our culture has conditioned more and more students to see college’s role as merely “contractual and transactional.” This replaces the older, broader conception of higher education as a way to explore “what it means to be human … how earlier individuals and societies coped with the human condition; how they defined moral character and the lack of it; and what standards of excellence inspired and guided them.”
Yet those are the very sorts of intellectual habits, inculcated through English, history, art, music, and political science, that provide the framework of knowledge and morals, along with the analytic and reflective abilities and proclivities, which produce a citizenry fully capable of wise self-government.
Part of the problem, Sewall writes, is that humanities departments themselves have been taken over by people whose goal is not to preserve and inculcate such knowledge and wisdom but to overturn it.
He’s right.
Volumes more could be written on all this. For now, though, we should recognize this trend for the tragedy it is, and vow, somehow, to counteract it.
