A Crisis of Confidence, Vol. 9

In a continuation of my reflections from yesterday's post, I want to discuss the remainder of the article I mentioned yesterday.  One of the chief intellectual problems I face is the question of just how valuable in a broad sense my work can be.  The writer points to at least one way the humanities remains valuable even in an increasingly commodified higher ed climate:

To say that excessively specialized humanities scholarship today is irrelevant is not to say that the humanities are irrelevant. The humanities are that space in the university system where power does not have the last word, where truth and beauty as well as insight and eccentricity reign supreme and where young people come into contact with the great traditions, writing, and thinking that have made us whom we are today. The humanities introduce us to our ancestors and our forebears and acculturate students into their common heritage. It is in the humanities that we learn to judge the good from the bad and thus where we first encounter the basic moral facility for making judgments. It is because the humanities teach taste and judgment that they are absolutely essential to politics. It is even likely that the decline of politics today is profoundly connected to the corruption of the humanities.

"The corruption of the humanities?"  This is where I would be likely to be looked at askance by some of my colleagues.  I don't think there's any question that the disciplines of the humanities are in themselves the most worthy to be studied:

What unites culture and politics is that they are “both phenomena of the public world.” Judgment, the primary faculty of politics, is discovered, nurtured, and practiced in the world of culture and the judgment of taste. What the study of culture through the humanities offers, therefore, is an orientation towards a common world that is known and understood through a common sense.  The humanities, Arendt argues, are crucial for the development and preservation of common sense—something that is unfortunately all-too-lacking in much humanities scholarship today.

What this means is that teaching the humanities is absolutely essential for politics—and as long as that is the case, there will be a rationale for residential colleges and universities. The mania for distance learning today is understandable. Education is, in many cases, too expensive. Much could be done more cheaply and efficiently at colleges. And this will happen. Colleges will, increasingly, bring computers and the internet into their curricula. But as powerful as the internet is, and as useful as it is as a replacement for passive learning in large lectures, it is not yet a substitute for face-to-face learning that takes place at a college or university. The learning that takes place in the hallways, offices, and dining halls when students live, eat, and breathe their coursework over four years is simply fundamentally different from taking a course online in one’s free time. As exciting as technology is, it is important to remember that education is, at its best, not about transmitting information but about inspiring thinking.

Sadly, most of my colleagues would take the above as an ideological attack aimed at their chosen disciplines/values/etc.  As long as this kind of critique is seen as a kind of anti-intellectual demagoguery (I have heard similar critiques--and their authors--be summarily dismissed with just this language), the necessary adjustments (and I do believe they are utterly necessary) will not take place until the market forces our hand--which it may have already done, given the kind of conversations I hear when the state secondary and higher ed curricula come up.  

The article does counter one oft-suggested solution:

The focus on pedagogy is a mistake and comes from the basic flawed assumption that the problem with the humanities is that the professors aren’t good communicators. It may be true that professors communicate poorly, but the real problem is deeper. If generations of secondary school teachers trained in pedagogy have taught us anything, it is that pedagogical teaching is not useful. Authority in the classroom comes from knowledge and insight, not from pedagogical techniques or theories.

The pressing issue is less pedagogy than the fact that what most professors know is so specialized as to be irrelevant. What is needed is not better pedagogical training, but a more broad and erudite training, one that focuses less on original research and academic publishing and instead demands reading widely and writing for an educated yet popular audience. What we need, in other words, are academics who read widely with excitement and inspiration and speak to the interested public.

More professors should be blogging and writing in public-interest journals. They should be reviewing literature rather than each other’s books and, shockingly, they should be writing fewer academic monographs.

To say that the humanities should engage the world does not mean that the humanities should be politicized. The politicization of the humanities has shorn them of their authority and their claim to being true or beautiful. Humanities scholarship can only serve as a incubator for judgment when it is independent from social and political interests. But political independence is not the same as political sterility. Humanities scholarship can, and must, teach us to see and know our world as it is.

The critique he levels against "pedagogical" thinking is apt, I think.  My experience has been that while some of my students who focus on Education are quite bright, the qualities they bring to the classroom (when and if they become teachers) will have very little to do with the theories they know (especially that blasted "Bloom's Taxonomy" which is apparently gospel) and much more to do with the actual things they know--how much and widely they have read, how intellectually curious they are, how carefully they are able to analyze not only their own thinking and writing but that of others.  Conversely, I have observed many colleagues both in graduate school and later--and there were some whose teaching could not be saved, yea, even by years of workshops on classroom management techniques.

But because this sounds suspiciously "conservative," it would be dismissed right out of hand, especially in the current climate.