A Defense of the Humanities

Interesting interview with Jennifer Frey at The Point:

Only about 7 percent of incoming freshmen at Harvard will report planning to major in any humanities, any single one of them. How can that be? Well, I think a lot of it obviously comes down to the fact that we are told that education is for work. If education is for career, philosophy looks like a bad bet. (Actually, empirically, it’s not that bad, but prima facie, it looks like a bad bet.) And so when higher education is no longer, in any meaningful sense, liberal, it’s not the sort of education that everyone needs to be a free person and citizen. It’s reduced to a credential that you need, or a set of skills that you need to get a high-paying job.

It’s really no surprise that the humanities are suffering in that context. I believe that they will continue to suffer until that sort of status quo is disrupted somehow. So, if I had to put a thesis on the table for us to discuss it would be that the crisis of the humanities cannot be solved until general education is fixed, and general education should be unapologetically liberal in the strong sense of an education that befits a free person and citizen. We can talk about what that sort of education might entail, but I think we need to go back to the origins of that way of speaking—that there was a difference between a liberal and a servile education. And what marked off a liberal education was that it’s an education that is not yoked to some specific trade or line of work but just makes you free. . . .

When we think about general education, it’s what we think everyone in an institution of higher education needs to study. Whatever it is that we come up with there, we need to be asking: What is it that is going to make them wise? “Higher” education shouldn’t be higher just in its cost or in years—like it’s your thirteenth or fourteenth year of school. No, we should be thinking in terms of your highest aspirations as a human person. And to me that means that you need to be searching for something more than expertise; you need to be searching for wisdom.

I used to believe intensely in this kind of education. For myself, I still bellieve in it; this is the life I live in my mind, a pursuit of wisdom based on far-ranging exploration of everything from Paleolithic art to sub-atomic physics. I find that this makes me allergic to all strong ideologies. But I am increasingly despondent about even trying to practice this on a large scale, and therefore not at all sure that our society should be spending billions of dollars forcing undergraduates into this mold. So far as I can see, most of them get little out of it and many of them actively hate it. How is it wise or liberal to force young people to take courses in topics they do not care about?

You can say, well, the alternative seems to be people educating themselves by watching angry TikToks and ending up believing in Jewish space lasers. Fair enough. (Marjorie Taylor Greene has a BA in business). But Lenin, Trotsky and Robespierre all had liberal educations, as did thousands of slave owners, Klan members, dictators, would-be dictators, toadies of dictators, tabloid leftists, stock scammers, etc. 

The relationship between humanistic education and political wisdom is, shall we say, muddled.

So while I am highly susceptible to rhetoric like Frey's, I am skeptical that this sort of thinking will lead to any meaninful educational program.