Beltane\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Last Frost Moon<\/p>\n
On a pile of essays, yet unread, sits one at the top, “The Great River of the Classics”, by Camille Paglia.\u00a0 She is my heroine, an outspoken advocate for the content of the humanities, the deposit of art, music, literature and theater that flows from Western civilization’s beginnings in the fertile crescent, a river with a delta now rich with islands and streams, a fan of human experience at its most intense and intimate that nourishes the ocean that is Western humanity’s collective conscious and unconscious.<\/p>\n
Egypt’s splendor, the profundity and innovation of the Greeks, the ordered ambition of the Romans, the spirituality of the Celts, the deep feeling of the Russians and the Germans, the list is long and has depth.\u00a0 Gilgamesh.\u00a0 The Egyptian Book of the Dead.\u00a0 The fragments of the Pre-Socratic.\u00a0 Jewish texts.\u00a0 Christian and Muslim texts.\u00a0 The pyramids.\u00a0 The parthenon.\u00a0 Rome.\u00a0 The pantheon. Fra Lippa.\u00a0 Giorgio. Botticelli.\u00a0 Michelangelo. Da Vinci.\u00a0 Petrarch.\u00a0 Erasmus.\u00a0 Francis Bacon.\u00a0 Titian.\u00a0 Brueghel.\u00a0 Boccaccio. Chaucer.\u00a0 Beowulf.\u00a0 The poetic eddas.\u00a0 Ovid.\u00a0 Turner.\u00a0 Poussin.\u00a0 Rembrandt.\u00a0 Barye.\u00a0\u00a0 Tolstoy.\u00a0 Dostoevsky.\u00a0 Singer.\u00a0 the Baal Shem Tov.\u00a0 Racine.\u00a0 Shakespeare.\u00a0 Marlowe.\u00a0 Haydn.\u00a0 Mozart.\u00a0 Beethoven.\u00a0 Brahms.<\/p>\n
And the many, the very many left out of this brief evocation.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the humanities do not pass the test of occupational preparedness, a test now applied to departments in higher education.\u00a0 Just yesterday an academic group released a study the dollar value of varying university degrees based on earnings over time and starting salaries.\u00a0 In many colleges and universities humanities departments look like low hanging fruit when it comes to the budget ax.<\/p>\n
So.\u00a0 If humanities degrees result in less earned income over a student’s life, does this make them, ipso facto, less valuable?\u00a0 Obviously.\u00a0 If, that is, the only yardstick is dollars.\u00a0 No, I’m not going to make the argument that dollars are a grubby, undistinguished measure; each of us has to eat, reside somewhere, raise our children and nourish our dreams.<\/p>\n
Even the fact that the humanities stood at the very center of the project of higher learning at its inception does not privilege them now.\u00a0 The needs and values of the middle ages were different from ours today.\u00a0 No, the humanities must stand valuable by today’s standards more than they must reflect the values of past centuries.<\/p>\n
It may be that the university is no longer the place for the humanities.\u00a0 It may be that higher education’s mission in contemporary life involves primarily occupational learning, a sort of advanced vocational training.\u00a0 Institutions focuses change over time.\u00a0 Their work must meet the needs of those whom they serve or they have no reason to exist.<\/p>\n
It does not bother me if higher education strips out the humanities.\u00a0 Let the music department perish.\u00a0 Banish the philosophers, the artists, the literati, the linguists and language crowd, let history go, too.\u00a0 Leave the ivy covered walls with only economics, business, pre-law, pre-med, engineering, architecture, agriculture, veterinary science, family and child psychology.\u00a0 Keep those subjects that inform the workers of today and tomorrow and let the fluff go.\u00a0 Keep the hard stuff, abandon the soft disciplines.<\/p>\n
Why don’t these changes bother me?\u00a0 Because an artist does not need an art department, she needs fellow artists and places to display and sell her goods, but art departments, no matter how good, no matter how well intentioned, are not necessary to artists.\u00a0 Work is.\u00a0 Literature, too.\u00a0 Writers write because they must, because words and ideas matter to them.\u00a0 No writer writes because there are good writing programs.\u00a0 Of course, they can learn things in those programs, but writing does not depend on English departments.\u00a0 Music, too, is part of the beating heart of culture.\u00a0 Musicians, whether trained in universities or not, will make music.\u00a0 Musicians will and do get trained in many other places than higher education.\u00a0 Philosophers are stuck with the sort of minds that go to the root of things and they will dig deep without philosophy departments.\u00a0 They need other philosophers, yes, but there are books and airplanes.<\/p>\n
The humanities are of, by and for humans.\u00a0 Because they are of our essence, they will survive diminished or even eliminated university and college support.\u00a0 Will they be poorer?\u00a0 Probably.\u00a0 For a while.\u00a0 But not for long.\u00a0 We need music to fill our souls.\u00a0 We need literature to grasp the many ways there are to be human.\u00a0 We need painting and sculpture and print making because beauty satisfies an essential yearning of the human spirit and because we need to experience the interior world of others as much as we can.\u00a0 We need those among us who will ask the difficult, the unpopular questions and pursue them where they lead.<\/p>\n
We need all of these things; they do not need higher education.\u00a0 It will be poorer without them, less reflective, more insular, more satisfied with apparently easy answers.<\/p>\n
What might happen is this.\u00a0 After the humanities have been ejected from higher education, humanities practitioners and scholars will meet, find they still need each other.\u00a0 An idea will occur to them.\u00a0 Why not have a place where the humanities can be taught?\u00a0 An institute, maybe.\u00a0 A gymnasium.\u00a0 An academy.\u00a0 Or, maybe something new.\u00a0 A virtual gathering space for artists and scholars, for writers and teachers.<\/p>\n
Out of these experiment might grow, what?\u00a0 I don’t know.\u00a0 Perhaps an educational institution with its primary mission immersing its students in the Great River of the Humanities, a baptism by art.\u00a0 Could happen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Beltane\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Last Frost Moon On a pile of essays, yet unread, sits one at the top, “The Great River of the Classics”, by Camille Paglia.\u00a0 She is my heroine, an outspoken advocate for the content of the humanities, the deposit of art, music, literature and theater that flows from Western civilization’s beginnings in the … Continue reading Higher Education Does Not Need The Humanities. But, We Do.<\/span>