Like everybody else in the country old enough to have flunked a math quiz, I can wish that test scores grew on trees; but schools serve the political and economic order in which they operate, and whether they deserve a passing or a failing grade begs the prior question asking what it is they’re supposed to teach. The answers change with time and circumstance. The curriculum proposed by Plato forbade the reading of poetry apt to “give a distorted image of the nature of the gods and heroes”; Castiglione offered instruction in “a certain nonchalance” likely to win the favor of a Medici prince or a Borgia duke;
John Milton believed “the end of learning” to be the knowledge and love of God. When Yale College in 1701 set itself up as a vessel of the true Puritan faith in the Connecticut wilderness, it undertook to supply the colony’s churches with an orthodox ministry, and to bestow upon its graduates the warrants of Christian character and spiritual worth. Thomas Jefferson in 1819 established the University of Virginia to develop “the reasoning faculties of our youth,” to improve in its nature what “was vicious and perverse” and by so doing to advance “the prosperity, the power, and the happiness of a nation.”
The mission statement accorded with the American regard for the intellect as a means of building a better mousetrap—the power of the imagination not to be trusted unless securely fixed to a scientific project or a financial speculation, if in its artistic expression it remains purely decorative: something that can be framed in gold leaf or played on a banjo. John Adams associated the arts with monarchy and superstition and hoped that they wouldn’t be encouraged in the new republic. Benjamin Franklin took a similar line. “To America,” he said, “one schoolmaster is worth a dozen poets, and the invention of a machine or the improvement of an implement is more important than a masterpiece of Raphael.”
By the end of the nineteenth century the nation’s power and prosperity was emerging from its oil refineries and its steel mills, and the direction of America’s educational affairs passed from the hands of clergymen into those of the pedagogues in charge of the newly minted university bankrolled by the newly ordained ministers of industry and finance, among them John D. Rockefeller, James B. Duke, Ezra Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Andrew W. Mellon, Andrew Carnegie, and Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Addressing a meeting of the New York City High School Teachers Association in 1909, Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, set forth the requirements of America’s newborn industrial civilization. “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education,” he said, “and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific manual tasks.” John Dewey in 1916 defined democracy as “primarily a mode of associated living,” and the schoolmasters of his generation cut the cloth of their teaching to the “needs and opportunities” of the prospective members of the national economic team, prepared to understand that what was great about America was the greatness of its gross domestic product, not the greatness of its love of liberty.
The revised purpose displaced Jefferson’s hope of a citizen schooled to the tasks of self-government and encouraged “to judge for himself what would secure or endanger his freedom.” Wilson as president of the United States in 1917 deleted the civics lesson with his promulgation of the Espionage Act, which marked as criminal any word or action unaligned with the imperative of “the national defense.” In April of that year the United States had entered World War I against the will and better judgment of 98 percent of the American people; for the duration of the war effort the Espionage Act served as the pretext for silencing any disloyal criticism of government policy. As a comfort and a means of political indoctrination for the American soldiers unclear as to why they were dying in the mud in France, the Wilson Administration’s propaganda office drummed up the course now known as “The Great Books,” the syllabus intended to transform the recruits bound for the Argonne Forest into what History Teachers Magazine called “thinking bayonets.” (emphasis added)
A long quote because I want to point out Lapham works at cross-purposes. He obviously prefers Jefferson's romanticism to Franklin's pragmatism, but he goes on to point out a college education is not for everyone, nor, in America, is it much more than a commodity. The distinct classes Woodrow Wilson advocates are a more pragmatic reflection of reality, because the fact is, not everyone needs to go to college.
When I was starting graduate school, just after college graduation, PSA's (are those even a thing anymore?) blanketed the airwaves (when those WERE a thing) telling all high school students: "To get a good job, get a good education." I told my students (I was a TA in English, in charge of my own classes of Freshman English) that message was bunk, and if they truly wanted a "good job," they should leave college and go to work. A college education only guaranteed them a chance, not a job; and not that much of a chance. I was right, based on the experience of myself and my friends. We got decent jobs; but it was never the world of the '50's and '60's as portrayed by John Cheever or John Updike (or even Philip Roth). "The Graduate" came closer to the truth. Plumbers and electricians have good jobs, too. And in many ways they are of more value to society (and commerce) than BBA degree holders; or the rest of us, for that matter.
Jefferson was imagining a new aristocracy, based not on blood but on property, an educated class limited to white male property owners as the proper citizens "schooled to the tasks of self-government and encouraged to 'judge for himself what would secure or endanger his freedom.'" The freedom of blacks, women, Native Americans, need not be considered. Land grant colleges were never about that, but until the 1960's, they were about educating white people, mostly men. I worked for a lawfirm in Austin in the early '80's. They were the first major lawfirm to have a woman lawyer on their roster. In the years I was there (80-84), they were flooded with women as lawyers because women were finally entering law school with the intention of doing something other than family law (in case you're wondering, large "serious" law firms don't do family law). By the time I got to law school, women made up over half the enrolled class. The dam had burst, but it had held for that long. When it came to getting a good job via a good education, certain people need not apply.
I never knew any black lawyers working in Austin; not when I practiced there. It never occured to me they were missing, either. Education is a gift to some, a restriction to others. Education is always a matter of what you are educated into. Those changes were largely a product of laws, by the way; the same laws Trump now says should be put away so all decisions are based on "merit." Or inheritance, one presumes.
But back to the point I emphasized in the quote above, there is a through line from there to here:
From time to time in the scholarly journals and the alumni magazines I come across articles that might as well be entitled “What in God’s Name Are the Humanities, and Why Are They of Any Use to Us Here in the Bright Blue Technological Wonder of the Twenty-First Century?” The question suggests that within the circles of informed academic opinion the authorities construe the humanities as exquisite ornaments, meant to be preserved, together with the banknotes and the jewels, in the vaults of the university’s endowment—an acquaintance with the liberal arts one of those proper appearances that must be kept up, together with the house in Southampton and the season’s subscription to the Metropolitan Opera. Apparently content to believe that man’s machines have vanquished nature, subjugated the tribes of Paleolithic instinct, and put an end to history, the oracles in residence walk to and fro among the old trees sold to the alumni as naming opportunities, speaking of tenure and tables of organization, of Rembrandt’s drawings and Shakespeare’s plays as pheasants under glass. Their piety recalls the lines of Archibald MacLeish:
Freedom that was a thing to use
They made a thing to save
And staked it in and fenced it round
Like a dead man’s grave.
To bury the humanities in the tombs of precious marble is to fail the quiz on what constitutes a decent American education. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, our technologists produce continuously improved means toward increasingly ill-defined ends; we have acquired a great many new weapons and information systems, but we don’t know at what or at whom to point the digital enhancements. Unless the executive sciences look for advice and consent to the senate of the humanities, we stand a better than even chance of murdering ourselves with our own toys. Not to do so is to make a mistake that is both stupid and ahistorical.
Beyond anything else they could imagine the ancient Greeks admired what Sophocles called the glittering play of “wind-swift thought.” Pericles in his funeral oration boasted not of the weapons or the works of art collected in the city, although these were many and beautiful, but of the character of the Athenian citizen—self-reliant, resourceful, public-spirited, marked by “refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy.” The term humanist appears in the Italian Renaissance, coined by scholars who rejoiced in both the pride of mind and the pleasures of the flesh. Correctly understood, the humanist ideal connotes ambition tempered with irony, embraces feats of courage as heroic as those to be seen on the playing fields at Ohio State. Humanism is the passion of thought and the will to understand: the voyage of Odysseus, great-hearted and wide-wandering; Charles Darwin sailing for the Galápagos and Fyodor Dostoevsky in trouble with the police; the Marquis de Condorcet hunted by the agents of the guillotine, at bay in a Paris garret writing his outline of human progress so that he might awaken mankind to the chance of its possible perfection; Mr. Mulholland at the blackboard in San Francisco, up against Hannibal’s elephants and Cleopatra’s barge, defending the frontiers of the American republic with a badly wounded piece of chalk.
Straight as the flight of an arrow hurled towards a target, unbending as a yardstick. The chalk and Mr. Mulholland is an anecdote I had to elide here.
Those lines from MacLeish remind me of C.P. Snow's once infamous (now forgotten) essay "The Two Cultures." Snow argued that humanities professors were snobs who looked down on science and engineering (in today's terms, just "technology"), based on the distinction since medieval times (when universities were founded) that the humanities were superior to the merely "technical" fields. Hume, after all, had reduced all knowledge to provable but mostly unimportant statements ("this stone is heavy") and completely unprovable, and so irrelevant, statements: "This flower is pretty." The humanities never had much use for Hume, but they appreciated his disposal of empiricism, and clung to Kant's Idealism as, well...the Ideal.
Snow argued such professors were ignorant of the first law of thermodynamics, which he argued was equivalent to an ignorance of the works of Shakespeare. He meant there, like Pound coming to Whitman confessing himself the son of a pig headed father, to be a commerce between them. Instead, science took over and the humanities flailed and fell. Right after the seminary did, which was the real purpose of Harvard and Yale, in the beginning: to educate the children of white male landowners so they would be worthy of God's church and the pastors they educated to be in charge there.
So it has gone.
I agree that 'humanism is the passion of thought and the will to understand," but I also think art is as essential to human being (in more or less the sense of "being" as the phenomenologists mean; but they're Continental philosophers, so the Anglo-American school disregards them almost completely) as science or math is. Music is so akin to math we have musical prodigies just as we have math prodigies. There are not literary prodigies, because learning to tell a story and what to tell, and why, requires life experience. Mozart could perform music as soon as he could sit at a keyboard; as could other prodigies before and after him. What young child can write a sonnet about love as moving as those of the great poets? Or a tragedy about the grim realities of human existence, at a tender young age? Even Picasso had to be trained in art, in order to become...Picasso. But, as I've argued before, art is not subject to the "hierarchy of needs."
I had a German professor, a German trained in Germany, who tried to encourage us to read the classics, that short shelf of books upon which most of Western thought and culture (and history) rest. He argued that the Greeks came down to the coast and the islands and found life so salubrious there that their culture flourished into the art and science and philosophy which is literally basic to Western culture. But that's the hierarchy of needs hypothesis: only when the Greeks had satisfied the basics (shelter, food, clothing), could they pursue the abstract: art, science (as they practiced it), literature, and philosophy. What, then do we make of the cave paintings at Lascaux? The rock art in south Texas. What settled culture, with all their "needs" met, produced this art? What needs did the tribes that made Israel have met when they began shaping their narrative of a creator God of Abraham, and told each other stories of Abram and Abraham, who became one figure? Or wrote the Song of Solomon, or the Psalms? Or the prophecies and the Lamentations of Jeremiah, when all those "needs" were reduced to rubble and penitude and Exile?
Yeah, humans are mechanistic and only pursue happiness alone, when that's how you define them. Descartes, following the teachings of his day, declared animals to be automotons, bereft of souls and therefore feelings, or even awareness.
Sure.Elephant pretends to eat this guys hat
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