How do you define “competency” in the humanities? Is it being able to expound on Hegel’s influence on Marx at a cocktail party? Is it being able to answer “Name King Lear’s daughters” while watching Jeopardy? Granted, reading the great works of literature will make a student’s life richer and understanding the great philosophers will help one understand the world in which they live, but do you really need a PhD to explain it to them, especially if they are going to go on some tangent about “the patriarchy” or “the oppression of the masses”? I think the main benefit of the humanities is that a student is required to read these texts (except Shakespeare at Yale) when they otherwise would not.
Wow, you really haven’t spent much time in humanities classes, have you?
Here’s how I define “competence” in humanities, with variations depending on discipline:
• The ability to read challenging texts. This competency includes the resilience to read and comprehend long-form primary and secondary texts. So, yes, part of the benefit is compelling students to work their way through Shakespeare (or any other source) when they otherwise would not.
• The ability to decode and interpret texts, images, and artifacts. Doing so requires understanding of context as well as language (including language that might be archaic or might carry meanings or significance that would be different than in contemporary usage), enough to detect bias, infer audience, and identify purpose. Students might use these skills to question longstanding assumptions or inherited understanding about the past (or about literature, philosophy, politics, etc.).
• The ability to locate and assess reliable sources (primary and secondary) that can inform a project or paper.
• The ability to develop an argument or interpretation based on a multitude of sources, some of which might be contradictory, many of which might be reliable or unreliable, but in different ways, and all of which might offer merely fragmentary evidence.
• The ability to write cohesively and persuasively – this involves establishing context, developing a convincing thesis statement, and pulling together scraps of evidence from different sources.
• The ability to offer a spoken defense of ideas and interpretations, which often demands students to have a depth of knowledge that would allow them to think on their feet and modify their argument in response to challenges or opposing interpretations.
• Speaking for my discipline, history requires people to assemble a picture of the past as if it were a jigsaw puzzle – but we only have maybe 10% of the pieces. To envision the other 90% and make it make sense requires the skills described above. And these are skills that meet the demands of a wide range of professions. And they are not skills that you can pick up solely through independent reading, à la Will Hunting.
Notice that none of the above involves tangents about upending “the patriarchy” or ranting about “the oppression of the masses.” Those interpretations might be the outcome of the intellectual process in some classes, but the process is paramount.
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Honestly, while I get that we like to debate things into fine dust around here (and I’m certainly guilty of it), you have such a hardline view on this that I’m guessing it’s not really worth our time going through it. Plus, it’s clear your view is informed by politics and that goes beyond the scope of the thread. I’ll just write this and leave it to you to do with it what you wish:
This is a subject that, to get anywhere other than the extreme poles, requires a little appreciation of nuance and a little experience and little willingness to acknowledge what you see with honesty. It’s like the example I gave above with law school. It’s very hard to explain to the uninitiated, though I don’t know a single lawyer who doesn’t understand and agree with the point. It’s not a math proof. There are ostensible and less obvious differences between a 22 year old who’s been through college (making an effort and not drinking and screwing around for 4 years) and one who immediately jumped into the work force right after high school. That kind of college experience is helpful in life in varying ways that is hard to put into a simple soundbite, even if the course of study is not directly related, or at all related, to a specific job application.
Sure, there are people who can do it all on their own. They tend to be unusually intellectually curious for their age and probably in other ways are the exception. But even those people are at a disadvantage because a good portion of the intellectual development in college goes beyond “just reading it.” It’s having an expert offer interpretations, challenge other views, discuss it in varying contexts, give historical perspectives, encourage discussion, etc. etc. etc. There’s a lot more to it than just reading it all on your own time. You also learn from others and expand your horizons that way. At least I always have.
Again, I find the “just do it in high school and/or on your own in the library” take so overly simplistic and so removed from my own view that it kind of indicates to me it’s not worth the bother.
ETA: To be clear, nobody is advocating everybody needs a PhD in anything.
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I agree there can be some very diminishing returns in conversations like this, but I would like to try to suggest at least one more big picture thought.
One thing that eventually became clear to me is that the best reading and writing is usually done collaboratively. Like, typically it will involve groups reading something in common, discussing what they read, editing and commenting on each other’s written work on that subject, and so on. Sometimes these are peers, sometimes there are students and teachers, or writers and editors, or associates and partners, and so on. But there is some form of live collaboration that makes these activities much more meaningful and productive than they would be if each person was instead just working in isolation.
This definitely is not something that can only happen in a college, but this is basically what a college is all about! Like, literally, the Latin collegium was a reference to some sort of organized community or society, and the roots basically mean a group of people choosing to come together.
And I think a lot of us who saw our college experience as very beneficial look back on it fondly as a time when it was so easy to come together with so many different groups of people to do a wide variety of interesting things.
Again, definitely not all just reading, discussing, and writing, and obviously even that stuff was not limited to Humanities classes at all.
But the very nature of a residential college makes it an opportunity to do so many different collaborative things. So however that does or does not get reflected in your graduating major, I certainly hope students in a residential college take seriously that opportunity, and make use of it repeatedly while they have the chance.
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I taught my kids that it’s ok to love what you love. What you love is what you value, and I trust that my kids have good values.
My 2 kids are very different from each other. My S22 is majoring in something that is widely seen as “useless.” It looks like my D25 may be going to trade school. I support both.
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I find this interesting because I didn’t write a single essay and (apart from one compulsory philosophy course in high school) didn’t study any humanities subjects after the age of 14. College was math, math and more math. The closest I got to philosophy was quantum mechanics (does god play dice with the universe?)…
So there was no learning humanities subjects from “experts” as part of the curriculum. But there was a huge amount of intellectual discussion with friends (studying a range of subjects) about all sorts of issues, and we went to debates with leading political figures etc. And we certainly all read widely about politics, economics, international affairs etc on our own time. To me those peer group interactions were far more relevant than any compulsory general education courses would have been (and the best reason to attend an elite college). To many students, including my kids, most general eds are a tedious distraction from more interesting courses that they actually want to take.
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I don’t know about you, but I learned all those skills in high school (except decoding “artifacts” - not sure what you are getting at there). Slogging through old texts and deciphering the meanings of English from a bygone era - check. (God, I hated reading Dickens.) Researching sources for a paper or presentation - check. Developing a coherent argument based on multiple, sometimes contradictary, sources - check. Writing cohesively and persuasively - check. Defending my ideas verbally - check. (I had a pair of teachers for AP American History who used the Socratic method and they were brutal.)
This harks back to earlier posts equating college grads today to high school grads 20 years ago.
As to “the patriarchy” and “oppression”, maybe I have watched too many interviews with Jonathan Haidt bemoaning the lack of open enquiry and leftward shift in the academy. Not all humanities programs at all colleges have become dogmatic echo chambers where dissent is discouraged, but enough have that it is a problem. This is a major reason I would not support my son pursuing a humanities degree at an US university today.
You start learning those skills in high school, sure (as did I – I graduated from HS in the late '80s, for reference). But what I learned in high school – at my highly selective, notoriously rigorous, nationally known high school – simply prepared me for college, and it prepared me very well! But it did not prepare me for life. High school students in my era did not do the work that college students were expected to do, and they don’t now, either.
The research I did in HS, for example, paled in comparison to what I was able to do in college – that’s as it should be, because we’re supposed to make progress as we get older and more intellectually sophisticated. High school students today can accomplish more with research than we could back then because more information is available online – but that doesn’t mean they have the experience and judgment to know good research from bad. Only experience (and effective instructors) can teach that. Same with writing. Honestly, one would hope that one’s writing as a sixteen-year-old would not hold up to one’s writing in college and beyond. High school is a start, but it is not enough.
Jonathan Haidt is in a business school, btw. I would not trust him for insight into what actually goes on in humanities classes. In my experience, business school faculty are not always terribly supportive of humanities education (yes, there are exceptions – but not many).
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Sounds like you went to a rigorous high school. Not everyone has that option.
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I don’t believe that all Humanities disciplines share the tilt you describe- and certainly not at all institutions.
I studied Classics in the 1970’s and there is no question it was taught as the purview of “Dead white men”. So if there is moderately more attention being paid now to the issue of slavery in the Roman Empire, I don’t think that’s problematic. It is surprising to me now looking back- I took a seminar on “citizenship” for example-- and nobody bothered to ask why the majority population of every territory Rome conquered was not considered part of the citizenry. Nobody asked. We all just assumed that slaves, concubines (which in most cases was a fancy term for an unpaid sex worker or a minor being exploited), weren’t counted and that was that.
So if you are afraid that your kid will be "indoctrinated’ by spending at least ten minutes in college thinking through the old models-- I promise you, that’s not likely to happen. I am not indoctrinated now, even though I recognize that when someone in power is having sex with a 12 year old, there is both pedophilia and a power imbalance going on.
And civilization survives.
An addendum (because I just thought of it). There’s a fascinating diary written by a Jewish woman who lived in Northern Germany, born in 1646. Her name was Gluckel, and the book is typically called “Gluckel of Hamlin”. The work is well known among historians who focus on the Jewish communities of Europe, but until recently, didn’t have much of an academic audience outside of that.
It is a very well known work WITHIN traditional Jewish communities because it is part of a genre of women’s writings, many of which have been passed down. Personal prayer books, what were known as “ethical wills” (basically telling your children and grandchildren which values you’ve tried to pass down to them) and other “domestic” writings. The more recent popularity of her writing comes from outside the Jewish community and Jewish historian groups, because a close reading shows how much this woman (a widow supporting 12 or so children) was involved in business, the geopolitics of her age, how a woman could participate in the economy outside of her own home or city, etc. AND it is written in an early version of Yiddish which up until recently has been considered a regional dialect with no agreed upon spelling, grammar, lexicon, etc. So a full literary work of a supposedly oral language is rare.
So now it’s of interest to linguists, sociologists, and a wide range of cultural historians apart from the traditional audience.
Is this a pernicious trend and an example of the indoctrination of the academy-- that a woman’s diary is now considered important by academics? I guess you could see it that way. Or you could applaud it and say that if women have been 50% of human history, it’s an important step forward when a fully developed literary work which captures an interesting time in history (in addition to the view of family life, the economics of her household, ) becomes widely known and studied.
But I don’t think anyone’s kid is going to suffer by reading ONE work written by a woman from the 17th century amidst the 20 or so other works assigned during a semester, all of which were written by men. And considered MUCH more important in understanding a time and a place.
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And of course it is hard to know what you don’t know in cases like this. As in, if you end some sequence of education in HS, you may not have much familiarity with what would have come next in college, grad/professional school, and so on.
Anyway, some might also find this observation relevant–in most countries in the world, by the time you start your bachelor’s level degree program at “uni”, you are considered to be done with your “general education”. The US in that sense is a bit of an outlier in that at least most four-year colleges believe your general education should be continuing, although in practice that may be largely concentrated in your first couple years or so, with more specialization happening in the last couple years.
This often filters back into their secondary systems as well–by the time you are in the last year or two, you might well already be specializing in various respects. Like, it would not be uncommon at all for someone in the UK system who was thinking of doing a STEM course at uni to only do Maths and some particularly relevant sciences for their A-Levels.
And somewhat related, they may also have professional courses in fields like law or medicine that start at the same time as bachelor’s courses and then end with you being qualified to obtain the relevant license, not a sequence where first you get a four-year bachelor’s and then you do your JD, MD, or so on, usually at a different school.
I am pointing this all out because for sure there are some educational systems built around the idea that by the time you are getting a uni degree, general education, exploration, and so on should be over. And there are certainly people who think that is the better approach.
Personally, though, I tend to think while that may be an OK approach for a few kids, for the most part the US system better reflects the realities of human development. Like, I just don’t think teenagers are typically developed enough for their general education to be over, for them to be locking so tightly into a particular path, and so on. To be fair, the secondary system in these cases may basically go one year longer, but even so I think that is often not enough, particularly given how that last year or two may already be involving a lot of specialization anyway.
But in any event, I sometimes think the way some people talk about college and majors sounds more applicable to these other models, not so much the US model. And of course if you think those other models are better, you might not see that as a problem at all. But personally, I still see a lot of virtues in the US model.
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I could tell the same story about so many diaries and other manuscript works by women in early American history. Here’s one broad example: the commonplace book, which was a manuscript genre somewhat akin to a literary scrap book. Men and women kept them, collecting poems, scientific writings, excerpts of letters, and essays, prayers, etc. But they served an especially important purpose among women, who had trouble convincing (male) printers to publish their work. So they collected women’s poems, essays, and other writings, serving as the hubs of women’s cultural and literary networks. Some of the women writers featured in these commonplace books (which were circulated among friends and acquaintances) are now recognized as the most skilled writers and astute intellectuals of their time – who could not get published because they were women. But they still had audiences and readers (probably nearly as numerous as those who read men’s published work, given the highly local scope of publishing at the time).
So who is indoctrinated? The students who learn that the world of intellectual discourse and literature belonged almost entirely to men in the 18th century? Or the students who learn that there was this much wider and more diverse intellectual and literary landscape in which women played active roles, but which we’ve not really explored until recently because of earlier historians’ blind spots and faulty assumptions?
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Shelby, I am now doing a deep dive- thank you SO much for this informative post!
Yes, women’s informal literary/archival efforts are bubbling to the surface and yielding some surprising information. I heard a lecture recently about the Civil War, and one of the sources were letters written by women to family members. It really brought home the tragedy of families where one son enlisted to fight for the North and another was fighting for the South.
You can just feel the ache and longing. Lincoln’s letters to Gold Star parents are rightfully famous- he was eloquent and wrote with such empathy. So we’ve known about the tragedy “from the top” for a long time. But humanizing the losses by reading from the mothers- letters written to a sister, a childhood friend, an adult child- Ooof. What impact. Families caught in the crossfires – literally.
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Jonathan Haidt’s education and research was in psychology, and he spent much of his career teaching that subject at UVA and Princeton. He did not move to The Stern School until later in his career, and he teaches classes on moral psychology and business ethics, not finance and operations research.
That said, any academic on campus could see the trends towards intolerance and dogma over the past couple decades.
This reminds me of my S22. As a high school freshman, he decided he was dissatisfied with his writing and set a goal to improve. With this goal in mind, he put himself on his high school’s IB track because it required more writing than the AP track. By the time he graduated from high school, he could identify many ways his writing was stronger than it had been freshman year (and he had been a decent writer to begin with.)
He wondered how much his writing would improve in college considering he was attending a strong but not “elite” school, but after his first year he again could identify ways he had improved.
And then sophomore year–a breakthrough! In a class (about women writers actually) he received lots of encouragement and personal attention from the prof, and he saw his writing leap forward. “I don’t know how to explain it, I just know what I am doing in a way that I didn’t before.”
It’s been a thrill for him, and a thrill for us parents to watch. We will see where it takes him (he has no desire to be a writer, per se.)
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I tend to believe that good writing reflects good thinking, so it doesn’t really matter if he wants to be a writer – continued improvement in writing is a lifelong project in sharpening the mind. Kudos to your son for undertaking it!
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I did go to a rigorous high school. In fact, my high school was likely very similar to Shelby’s, based on her description. And you are right, not everyone gets that opportunity.
The funny thing is that my mother grew up during the depression in a little farm town in downstate Illinois. While reading some of her papers from high school and college (a land grant public) it was clear that she wrote as well, or better, than almost everyone I knew at my top 20 university. Again, we are back to the idea that college today is like high school 20 years ago.
Please let’s get back on topic.
Thank you!
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I’ve heard the term “lessons learned in the field” used in those cases.
That sounds like a great program.
I know a 23 year old machinist who makes $60/hr, which translates to $124,800/yr before overtime. Add some overtime or extra shifts and he is making $150,000/yr as a journeyman. If he ignores the siren call of $100k loaded F250s, lives well within his means and invests, he can wake up when he is 30 with a nice nest egg. And this is before he boosts his income by becoming a shift manager, or moving up into some other leadership role at the company.
I do not know if that is just what his company pays machinists, or if he has some specialty training that boosts his hourly rate, but not bad for a guy with a high school education and skilled trade.
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