A practical case on why we need the humanities
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Re: A practical case on why we need the humanities
#2The academic humanities departments have made their bed over the last fifty years.
Now they may lie in it.
Re: A practical case on why we need the humanities
#3The academic humanities departments have made their bed over the last fifty years. Now they may lie in it.
Sorry, I'm not sure what you're referring to?
Re: A practical case on why we need the humanities
#4Re: A practical case on why we need the humanities
#5Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, I'm not sure what you're referring to?
I'm guessing over-admission, watered down standards and acquiescence to bad ideas, but I can't speak for the original poster.
Yes to all of that. A culture of fear and loathing. Charging obscene levels of tuition for it while piling the real work onto adjuncts. Close-mindedness that would make John Calvin blush. The list is extremely long.
There is no chance I would let a university humanities department anywhere near my children at this point.
Re: A practical case on why we need the humanities
#6The academic humanities departments have made their bed over the last fifty years. Now they may lie in it.
Sorry, I'm not sure what you're referring to?
The Sokal Hoax was a loud canary in the coalmine that was ignored:
Re: A practical case on why we need the humanities
#7The article suggests that many of the current fields of humanities are markers of wealth and status symbols, and that we need to move away from this. That may be true but a bigger problem to me is that the modern humanities have fragmented into many narrowly focused sub fields, which seem to be based on presuppositions about how the world works. These fields seem less like a legitimate area of study and more like pseudoscientific political tools, often working to legitimize perspectives that aren’t grounded in reality, and radicalizing students and our culture as a result. The grievance studies have drastically undermined the legitimacy of the humanities as a whole even though “core humanities” may not deserve the same critique. Unfortunately even though much has been written on this issue (https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...), I don’t see it affecting the momentum of these dubious programs at modern universities.
Re: A practical case on why we need the humanities
#8> The other thing we ask students to do, beyond merely encountering these things is to use them to practice argumentation, to reason soundly, to write well, to argue persuasively about them.
Generating propaganda? As that is all they seem to do.
Re: A practical case on why we need the humanities
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm guessing over-admission, watered down standards and acquiescence to bad ideas, but I can't speak for the original poster.
Yes to all of that. A culture of fear and loathing. Charging obscene levels of tuition for it while piling the real work onto adjuncts. Close-mindedness that would make John Calvin blush. The list is extremely long. There is no chance I would let a university humanities department anywhere near my children at this point.
> A culture of fear and loathing.
Examples?
> Charging obscene levels of tuition for it while piling the real work onto adjuncts.
This is endemic to the US university system, in general.
> Close-mindedness that would make John Calvin blush.
Again, it's all fun and games to riff and instantly disregard a vast number of fields of study, but you're not doing yourself any favors by just throwing out a laundry list. You have an immense distrust towards these departments: air your grievances, I'm sure a lot of us are interested.
> There is no chance I would let a university humanities department anywhere near my children at this point.
Universities tend to admit adults. Also, if your children go into university, are you going to refuse to pay for their general courses? They're going to have to touch a literature or history course eventually. Are you going to forbid them from taking 3 credit hours of Spanish?
Re: A practical case on why we need the humanities
#10apart from the benefit of the humanities in an undergraduate education, there are big positive externalities from the scholarly work as well.
for instance, even if most people never read any of the written work of historians, the existence of that community and its scholarly standards helps prevent a lot of bizarre, erroneous historical narratives from gaining traction, and society is much better off for it.