Keith Parsons: The Humanities and Being Human
Guest essay on 15 November/Wednesday
No reason to sugarcoat it: the best thing about reading Letters… is that you get to read Keith Parsons’s fine essays. Because I like to illustrate any essays with something, I’m here posting a pic of the title page of one of my favorite books—one whose subject matter overlaps somewhat with the subject Dr. Parsons addresses here. (I do recommend the book—but of course the essay here stands alone).
THE HUMANITIES AND BEING HUMAN
Keith Parsons
At universities around the country, the humanities are dying. Enrollments have plummeted, and university administrators are withdrawing their support. Required class sizes are raised, and classes that do not place the minimum number of butts in seats are nixed. A class of, say, a dozen students devoting a semester to the study of Greek drama, the philosophy of Kant, or the history of the Reformation will be dismissed as a “boutique” course, an expensive luxury that drains resources and produces no quantifiable good. (And “quantifiable” is the keyword for metrics-mad administrators.) With respect to public institutions, politicians demand to know what value taxpayers are getting from teaching those dwindling numbers of students about Keats or Kant. Why burden hard-working taxpayers to subsidize overprivileged elitists to idle in the groves of academe? Besides, don’t we know that those professors are a bunch of America-hating liberals who sit around the faculty club all day sipping Chablis and making fun of God, patriotism, and NASCAR?
Well. We are certainly a long way from the idea that higher education was to acquaint you with the best and most important things that your culture had to offer—the deepest thoughts, the most beautiful creations, and the most penetrating insights. Administrators still sometimes pay lip service to academic ideals— “critical thinking” is one of their favorites—without really knowing what they are or how to get them (Pssst. Critical skills are the ones you learn in some of those “boutique” courses.). Really, though, it is all about the bottom line. Nostalgia is a privilege of age. We look back through rose-tinted lenses. However, it really seems to me that when I was young, sometimes—just occasionally, perhaps—but sometimes, some things mattered more than money. Not now. Bottom line has replaced beautiful mind.
But does a liberal arts education have monetary value? Does it impart skills important for a career? Absolutely. Just Google “What is the Value of a Liberal Arts Education” for a plethora of sources. However, here I want to focus not on what a liberal arts education can do for a career, but what it can do for YOU. In particular, I want to focus on the humanities—literature, the arts, history, and philosophy. I am a recently retired professor of philosophy and humanities, so I will draw on my forty years of experience teaching in those fields.
For twenty years, I taught one course each year at a medium security prison, a unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. My university has a program for incarcerated students that offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees in humanities. I taught a variety of graduate and undergraduate courses, including ethics, the history of ideas, and “great texts” surveys. Among the authors we read were Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Aeschylus, Homer, Shakespeare, Galileo, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Darwin, and contemporary readings on neuroscience and the philosophy of mind.
Let me tell you about my students at the prison. I did not inquire about their crimes. None of my business. However, I am sure that many of them committed very serious offenses. Some had already served decades. They were at least as bright as my students on campus; some were gifted. They worked much harder than my students on campus. I imagine that my course was the highlight of their week. Probably not so for most of my on-campus students. Also, getting my students on campus to talk was often like pulling teeth. At the prison, discussion was always lively. No shrinking violets among those guys.
Prison is a soul-crushing environment. Its purpose is to keep a large number of people in a place where they do not want to be. Every other consideration therefore comes after security. My classes were always interrupted by guards doing counts. Sometimes there would be lockdowns when everyone was restricted to their cells for days at a time and class could not be held. The oppressive thing about prison is not brutality, at least, not where I was. It was the mind-numbing boredom of sheer routine and endless waiting. Nothing is convenient. Nothing is easy. Where you are and what you are doing is minutely controlled. Plus, the environment is just ugly. Walls, bars, razor wire, guard towers, heavy metal doors that clang shut behind you. Endless delays and checkpoints as guards lead one group through and then another.
In an environment that dehumanizes, the humanities re-humanize. My students there found in art, literature, and philosophy that there is beauty, meaning, and depth. They discovered, or rediscovered, that life is not just bars, walls, and guards, but contains brilliant creations, inextinguishable beauty, and thinking of ocean depth. Instead of guards barking orders, they could hear the words of Aeschylus or Shakespeare—words that roll like thunder and pierce like arrows. Instead of numbing boredom, they could argue with Socrates or Hume. With Darwin as their guide, they could admire the grandeur of life as it has evolved over deep time.
The humanities banish the mundane and reacquaint you with the wonder of nature, the power of intellect, and the convolutions of the human heart. How impoverished my life would be if I had not known Odysseus, Hector, Job, Clytemnestra, Pericles, Beowulf, Hamlet, or Descartes’s Demon. Such knowledge is of supreme value, a value that is increased rather than diminished by being given away. If administrators want numbers, we have the numbers and can show a direct correlation between the educational achievements of our incarcerated students and much lower rates of recidivism. I don’t need numbers. I can see the changes in my students.
The upshot is that the humanities really do impart practical skills. If administrators really want to promote critical thinking, they should want students to take more courses where they are taught to read texts closely, follow detailed arguments, evaluate competing interpretations, and express themselves clearly and cogently. In other words, they should want students to take more humanities courses.
And why should a student majoring in engineering, accounting, or human performance want to take humanities courses? Sometimes they are surly about humanities requirements. I had a student one time who said that she believed that students should not be required to read Shakespeare. My response was that reading Shakespeare should be read as a treat, not a requirement. If you plan to be an accountant, say, your accounting courses are your meat and potatoes. The humanities are your dessert. Making a living is one thing, and enjoying life is something more. Those who dismiss the humanities are not to be blamed but pitied. They repudiate a source of inexhaustible joy.
Should universities be in the business of helping people get the most out of life? I cannot think of a better reason for their existence.
Note: Anyone may copy and publish what I or my guests write, provided proper credit is given, that it’s not done for commercial purposes, that I am notified of the copying (you can just leave a comment saying where the copy is being published), and provided that what we write is not quoted out of context or distorted.
Beth Ann Fennelly, a teacher of creative writing at The University of Mississippi, wrote an article for the New York Times that says the same thing I did. It was republished in today's Houston Chronicle as "There's more to college degrees than dollar signs." Absolutely. Those who would put universities on a "business model" are those, as Oscar Wilde put it, "who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing." BTW, for an excellent book on the administrative obsession with metrics, read Jerry Z. Muller's The Tyranny of Metrics.
The philosophy courses I chose to take were my favorite courses in college. I wish I had minored in Philosophy or double majored.
As someone who spent my career as a professor, I’m not surprised your university students were less motivated than your prison students. It’s a sad state of affairs. Of course, I am happy your prison students were so engaged.
My dad taught courses at Coxsackie Prison in NYS when I was a kid. I think he taught a civics course. I remember being glad the prisoners had an opportunity for some education inside and proud of my dad for teaching there.