Dear Gentle Readers,
I will be writing up my own response to Preppy's post quite soon, but for now here is Dylz...
-Your Humble Author
So here is his response:
I have quite a number of points that I wanted to make in response to these two pieces, but I'm going to focus on the discussion of how the humanities should be approached.
Colin Clout argues in his piece:
"Personally, I have always believed knowledge for knowledge sake, but I have come to realize that this trope is no longer satisfying. So what is the relevance, the importance of humanities? What is the functionality of the academy?
"If the humanities does anything, it serves to continually question and refigure cultural and social narratives. In light of the current economical arguments against high ed, it seems that academia's real ability is in questioning the need for functionality. What does it mean for something to be functional?"
Preppy McPrepperson does not enjoy this freeform approach to the humanities:
"I think a good researcher of culture can often determine beyond a reasonable doubt what people intended to accomplish and what others perceived. More importantly, however, I think it's AS windows into such motivations and societal implications that culture, or history, or really most branches of the humanities, matter to begin with."
Let me say first that endless hours are spent parsing through every record and clip of footage to decipher modern-day presidents, and still these men remain mysteries to us, and they are even real and recent. We can collect evidence and glean that some theories are more plausible than others, but there is an asymptote between us and certainty about historical events, with every inch we make towards it making the next inch ever harder to achieve. This goes doubly so when the figures we discuss are fictional.
I make that point to say that historical knowledge doesn't override the opportunity to try to look at works and events in new ways.
So we have two competing schools of thought, oftentimes described in all sorts of delightfully extravagant academic terms. Colin Clout could be called a post-modernist, a theorist, or an advocate of the reader response theory of literature. Preppy McPrepperson could be called a modernist, a historicist, or an author biography theorist.
But the root difference between these two schools of thought is what they seek. Colin Clout's school sees the humanities as fundamentally introspective, a chance to peer deep into ourselves by our response to these works. A mirror is not important for where it was made, but what we see in it. Preppy McPrepperson sees these works as artifacts of history, things that illuminate the world in which they were written, and in turn are illuminated by that world. These works were written by real men at real times in real places, and there are traces of fingerprints on them that cannot be smudged away no matter how hard we try.
People have a tendency to argue that one of these two positions is more valid than the other. Is there a shortage of books that I wasn't aware of? Are there only so many copies of A Midsummer's Night's Dream to go around, so that if those who see literature as windows into our own souls get all of the copies, those who want to try to glean what the sexual mores of the time were will be out of luck? Or is it that books come with instruction manuals, but there are only so many copies of the manuals to go around so only the top academics get them? Are people breaking the rules when they approach a book in one way or another? Or people going to be somehow stopped from reading a book one way or another?
I don't mean to sound like I'm simply preaching that everyone's right and pleading "Why-can't-we-all-get-along?" People who argue for one of these positions over the other generally have the luxury of coming from high schools and colleges that, even if they focused on one approach over the other in classes, made the resources available for students to take both approaches, even if they personally preferred one over the other when writing their papers.
Having spent the past half year in China, with an educational system that encourages neither approach to the humanities, I can speak to the value of both approaches. Here, classes are large and centered around the wisdom the teacher has to impart to the students, but, after over a hundred of years of historical and national reinterpretation, this boils down to "This is what this texts says about being a good Chinese person, now write it down so you can repeat it back to me on a test." Even classes in the arts are often focused on training students to expertly reproduce classical styles that are considered emblematic of China.
The sciences, math, and engineering have survived relatively well, and along with practical degrees like business and foreign languages, are generally more apolitical and more directly useful for development than the humanities. The result of this is that students take relatively few classes in the humanities, and the classes that they take are generally centered on having textbook knowledge of pre-established, accepted forms and interpretations.
In addition to what my students say to me directly, it's easy to see the results of their educational system in class discussions. There's a personal uniqueness and richness that isn't there, and creativity is difficult for them. Students don't take the initiative in conversations, and in any topic, be it history or dating, I usually have to do quite a bit of prompting to keep the conversation going. Also, it's hard for them to build on each others ideas. I run debates in class sometimes, and they find it plenty easy to disagree with each other, but it generally takes the form of each side restating their original position rather than taking on the structure of point, counter-point, counter-counter-point, etc. They also don't have much of a sense of their place in history. I'll ask about a particular event or era, a student will say a few words, such as how it was really the fault of the Japanese, and most of the rest of the class will nod approvingly.
And my students hate Chinese schools. They know what's wrong, and there are exceptions to all of the situations I just described, exceptions that give me great optimism for this country and admiration for my students. They want classes to be smaller and for students to have more independence. They know full well that they haven't had the chance to intensively learn how to think critically or express their own intellectual and artistic ideas, and they ache for it.
So what is the function of the humanities?
Texts as mirrors:
- creativity, the ability to put an established idea or work into an utterly new light, is fostered
- individual character is developed as one finds unique sets of thoughts and impressions to take away from a work
- personal enjoyment of life is increased (even if we're all just functional cogs in an economic machine, we should at least enjoy our time as cogs)
- even applying the most out-of-place, outlandish theories to a work has functional work in that it is a chance to put intellectual flexibility and rigor to the test, taking seemingly tenuous connections and crafting arguments to make them hold
- and so on
Texts as artifacts:
- a greater appreciation for the personality of history
- lessons that can possibly be applied to our current challenges
- an appreciation for how cultural and intellectual concepts develop over time, building on themselves, diverging, and countering each other
- a aptitude for taking ambiguous passages of text and knowledge of a persons context, and building a coherent framework for what their mindset might have been, ie, taking uncertain evidence and creating strong arguments
- and so on
A well rounded humanities education approaches texts in both ways, but what's most important is that we value the humanities.
Colin Clout argues in his piece:
"Personally, I have always believed knowledge for knowledge sake, but I have come to realize that this trope is no longer satisfying. So what is the relevance, the importance of humanities? What is the functionality of the academy?
"If the humanities does anything, it serves to continually question and refigure cultural and social narratives. In light of the current economical arguments against high ed, it seems that academia's real ability is in questioning the need for functionality. What does it mean for something to be functional?"
Preppy McPrepperson does not enjoy this freeform approach to the humanities:
"I think a good researcher of culture can often determine beyond a reasonable doubt what people intended to accomplish and what others perceived. More importantly, however, I think it's AS windows into such motivations and societal implications that culture, or history, or really most branches of the humanities, matter to begin with."
Let me say first that endless hours are spent parsing through every record and clip of footage to decipher modern-day presidents, and still these men remain mysteries to us, and they are even real and recent. We can collect evidence and glean that some theories are more plausible than others, but there is an asymptote between us and certainty about historical events, with every inch we make towards it making the next inch ever harder to achieve. This goes doubly so when the figures we discuss are fictional.
I make that point to say that historical knowledge doesn't override the opportunity to try to look at works and events in new ways.
So we have two competing schools of thought, oftentimes described in all sorts of delightfully extravagant academic terms. Colin Clout could be called a post-modernist, a theorist, or an advocate of the reader response theory of literature. Preppy McPrepperson could be called a modernist, a historicist, or an author biography theorist.
But the root difference between these two schools of thought is what they seek. Colin Clout's school sees the humanities as fundamentally introspective, a chance to peer deep into ourselves by our response to these works. A mirror is not important for where it was made, but what we see in it. Preppy McPrepperson sees these works as artifacts of history, things that illuminate the world in which they were written, and in turn are illuminated by that world. These works were written by real men at real times in real places, and there are traces of fingerprints on them that cannot be smudged away no matter how hard we try.
People have a tendency to argue that one of these two positions is more valid than the other. Is there a shortage of books that I wasn't aware of? Are there only so many copies of A Midsummer's Night's Dream to go around, so that if those who see literature as windows into our own souls get all of the copies, those who want to try to glean what the sexual mores of the time were will be out of luck? Or is it that books come with instruction manuals, but there are only so many copies of the manuals to go around so only the top academics get them? Are people breaking the rules when they approach a book in one way or another? Or people going to be somehow stopped from reading a book one way or another?
I don't mean to sound like I'm simply preaching that everyone's right and pleading "Why-can't-we-all-get-along?" People who argue for one of these positions over the other generally have the luxury of coming from high schools and colleges that, even if they focused on one approach over the other in classes, made the resources available for students to take both approaches, even if they personally preferred one over the other when writing their papers.
Having spent the past half year in China, with an educational system that encourages neither approach to the humanities, I can speak to the value of both approaches. Here, classes are large and centered around the wisdom the teacher has to impart to the students, but, after over a hundred of years of historical and national reinterpretation, this boils down to "This is what this texts says about being a good Chinese person, now write it down so you can repeat it back to me on a test." Even classes in the arts are often focused on training students to expertly reproduce classical styles that are considered emblematic of China.
The sciences, math, and engineering have survived relatively well, and along with practical degrees like business and foreign languages, are generally more apolitical and more directly useful for development than the humanities. The result of this is that students take relatively few classes in the humanities, and the classes that they take are generally centered on having textbook knowledge of pre-established, accepted forms and interpretations.
In addition to what my students say to me directly, it's easy to see the results of their educational system in class discussions. There's a personal uniqueness and richness that isn't there, and creativity is difficult for them. Students don't take the initiative in conversations, and in any topic, be it history or dating, I usually have to do quite a bit of prompting to keep the conversation going. Also, it's hard for them to build on each others ideas. I run debates in class sometimes, and they find it plenty easy to disagree with each other, but it generally takes the form of each side restating their original position rather than taking on the structure of point, counter-point, counter-counter-point, etc. They also don't have much of a sense of their place in history. I'll ask about a particular event or era, a student will say a few words, such as how it was really the fault of the Japanese, and most of the rest of the class will nod approvingly.
And my students hate Chinese schools. They know what's wrong, and there are exceptions to all of the situations I just described, exceptions that give me great optimism for this country and admiration for my students. They want classes to be smaller and for students to have more independence. They know full well that they haven't had the chance to intensively learn how to think critically or express their own intellectual and artistic ideas, and they ache for it.
So what is the function of the humanities?
Texts as mirrors:
- creativity, the ability to put an established idea or work into an utterly new light, is fostered
- individual character is developed as one finds unique sets of thoughts and impressions to take away from a work
- personal enjoyment of life is increased (even if we're all just functional cogs in an economic machine, we should at least enjoy our time as cogs)
- even applying the most out-of-place, outlandish theories to a work has functional work in that it is a chance to put intellectual flexibility and rigor to the test, taking seemingly tenuous connections and crafting arguments to make them hold
- and so on
Texts as artifacts:
- a greater appreciation for the personality of history
- lessons that can possibly be applied to our current challenges
- an appreciation for how cultural and intellectual concepts develop over time, building on themselves, diverging, and countering each other
- a aptitude for taking ambiguous passages of text and knowledge of a persons context, and building a coherent framework for what their mindset might have been, ie, taking uncertain evidence and creating strong arguments
- and so on
A well rounded humanities education approaches texts in both ways, but what's most important is that we value the humanities.