More Human than Humanities

Occasionally I will listen to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast. It's an interesting show, but I can only take so much of his way of speaking and tone of voice. Anyway, in the last show he interviewed Victor Davis Hanson about Classical studies in the U.S. Hanson believes that study of the Classics of Greek and Roman literature are essential, and that the decrease in the emphasis of Classical Studies is leading to an unhappy and uneducated populous. He recently wrote a blog post about it where discusses the negative ramifications of the modern menu-based system of liberal undergraduate education and the rise of christian universities. Based on his interview and his writing, he has a few reasons for thinking this way:

1. Mandatory Classical Studies created a common curriculum for all students. It meant an emphasis on learning language and fixed systems for knowledge building and art.

2. Classical Studies emphasizes inductive reasoning over deductive reasoning, meaning "let's look at particulars and create a worldview around them" or "If something happens over and over, it will always happen again." Deductive reasoning, on the other hand, generally begins with a general premise and arrives at conclusions, like our modern scientific method.

3. Classical Studies emphasizes the limitations of humans in the face of Nature and Fate.

4. Classical Studies are always relevant because basic human characteristics never change.

Now I disagree with Hanson's premise, because "Western" culture was basically reset after the Middle Ages and is currently being rewritten in the Information Age. Here are my rebuttals:

4*. Human nature is constant, so the Classics will always be relevant, but are not always applicable. We always have to interpret Classical ideas or debates through a modern filter in order to apply them to current ideas and debates. This adds effort and error to the applicability of Classics to the modern.

3*.We understand how Nature and the universe works so much better than the Greeks and Romans that it makes a large portion of Classical Studies irrelevant. At this point we're trying to get our heads around how we are indirectly destroying our own home planet, not the other way around. We understand a large amount of cause and effect, and can effectively avoid disasters.

2*. I agree that critical thinking skills are abysmal in the U.S. But the argument that inductive reasoning is more important or more valid than deductive reasoning is ridiculous. They are simply forms of logic--tools, not ethics--and they lead to different types of knowledge. We use both every day, whether we realize it or not. And different areas of study have their own tools that are useful, so why regulate a single way of reasoning?

1*. If you really want a common curriculum to tie all educated citizens together, why does it have to be the Classics? You could just as easily select a varied curriculum that are more applicable to modern situations. And why emphasize learning dead languages? Why not learn Spanish to understand the subtleties of Jorge Luis Borges, or French to understand the intricacies of Barthes? These are both languages that are extremely useful today.

I'm a fan of the modern liberal education, where the student gets to choose their core classes. Yes, they typically go for the easy A, no-brainer courses like "Rocks for Jocks" and "Math for Trees" and the ubiquitous "Human Sexuality". But remember that one of the largest fallacies of the ancient philosophers was the idea that there could be one holistic system of knowledge that works for everybody. Well, everybody is different. The population is a bell curve. There are different types of learning and not everybody responds to them in the same way. What works for some will most certainly not work for another. This is why we need a choice so that those truly interested in their education and future can excell to their highest potential.

I will say, though, that I like how Victor Davis Hanson hates poststructuralism:

If Marx receded from economics departments, his spirit reemerged among our intelligentsia in the novel guises of post-structuralism, new historicism, multiculturalism, and all the other dogmas whose fundamental tenet was that white male capitalists had systematically oppressed women, minorities, and Third World people in countless insidious ways. The font of that collective oppression, both at home and abroad, was the rich, corporate, Republican, and white United States.

There was victim status for everybody, from gender, race, and class at home to colonialism, imperialism, and hegemony abroad. Anyone could play in these “area studies” that cobbled together the barrio, the West Bank, and the “freedom fighter” into some sloppy global union of the oppressed—a far hipper enterprise than rehashing Das Kapital or listening to a six-hour harangue from Fidel.

Unfortunately this quote came from a screed explaining how our liberal education system ultimately led to 9/11 and how President Bush's policies are reversing that trend.