(no subject)
Those who have talked too me in any detail about academia know that the Middle Ages are an era of particular intrigue to me. What is it about the "Dark Ages" that has caused them to be discarded so violently by modern academia? Lewis and Tolkien felt the treatment was unfair, and so do I. (To read more about this, check out The Discarded Image by Lewis. It's the text of one of his intro classes.) Few people know, however, that my recent musings have been directed from focusing on the Middle Ages to using them as a sort of a lens to view our postmodern society. One of the areas I've been particularly keeping an eye on is the interraction between the sciences and humanities. (To read more about this read Lewis Agonistes by Louis Markos. It's not nearly as imposing as it looks. :-P) I was looking up info on Marcus Borg last night, and I stumbled on an article from Oregon State that addressed the issue very interestingly and confirmed some things that I had thought.
A general liberal education has been a very important aspect
of education traditionally, and in state universities it is being
largely abandoned. You can major in history or major in English,
but you can't major in the sciences or engineering or forestry
or agriculture and still have enough exposure to the humanities
to give you much more than a very passing understanding. We're
impoverishing our students from what used to constitute the bulk
of knowledge about human beings.
There's a great book, which is taught in one of Bob's courses,
called Dr. Faustus by the German novelist Thomas Mann. It's a
novel about the German soul, and it's deeply historical in the
sense that it traces the history of the German culture from the
Middle Ages to the present.
Mann believes the reason Germany has been an unpredictable
part of the world in the last 75 years is because Germans had
less respect for the humanities and what he calls humane knowledge
and learning and too much respect for those things that Mann
said were least directly rooted in human life, namely the fruits
of imaginative investigation and enterprise--including science,
but also some of the higher arts such as music and mathematics.
According to Mann, and we think this is a viable part of the
interpretation of the Holocaust and the events of World War II,
this emphasis, which was not unique to Germany but stronger in
Germany than elsewhere, deprived the Germans of the vision of
human tolerance necessary for any society to function with a
strong sense of human dignity.
Mann contends that education is very important because it
has political consequences. The sciences and the arts are not
political by nature, but the humanities are deeply concerned
with human beings and the way they live their lives, including
politics and self-government. If the humanities are ignored and
all the emphasis put on science, a society risks skewing things
in the direction of inhumane life.
From a historical perspective, it's rather interesting to
compare the early 20th century to the early 21st century in terms
of the relative prestige of the sciences and humanities. Around
1900, electricity revolutionized the world, just as the computer
and Internet are doing so now. In the late 19th century, institutions
of higher education were committed to teaching the classics,
the humane classics as they were called, including philosophy
and languages and literature. As more and more science curriculum
was introduced, it wasn't long before the so called modern track
began to gain more prestige and the classic track had less prestige
and visibility in both American and European universities. Governments
began to realize that they had a stake in educating their citizens
scientifically because scientific and technical knowledge in
the long run benefited the state and increased its power.
Traditionally, the arts prosper in times of economic prosperity.
When there is money to be had and patronage to be given, people
give money to artistic foundations and organizations and can
spend money to go to performances and museums. During good times,
the arts do okay ... they limp along. But the problem is that
in bad times those things go belly up right away. They have no
endowment, no margin for survival, no government support in the
United States. Even though many European countries do support
and endow the arts rather generously, it is still a minuscule
part of the amount they allocate for support of technology and science.
Trying to find a balance between these two things is not an
easy matter, whether you're a pedagogue trying to teach your
students a balanced view of the world or a legislator sitting
in Washington trying to divide up the monetary pie. But it's
not just a question of equity, it's a question of the starvation--the
complete starvation--of one side and the enrichment of the other.
If we go 25 years down the road, and we hit a bump economically
and all the arts that operate according to private largesse and
generosity right now disappear, then the world will be a grimmer
place, a less humane place. We learn a lot from the arts about
tolerance and humanity and about ourselves that the sciences
don't teach us in the same way.
As state legislatures have cut support, public universities
have had to find other sources of financial support and have
turned increasingly to business. As a result, there is so much
emphasis on the so-called real world and preparing students for
the industrial and modernizing work force based on the Internet
and computers that some things are getting squeezed out. Pure
science is getting squeezed out a little bit and so are the humanities
and the arts because they don't have the same kind of industrial
or commercial base to which they can appeal for support.
A general liberal education has been a very important aspect
of education traditionally, and in state universities it is being
largely abandoned. You can major in history or major in English,
but you can't major in the sciences or engineering or forestry
or agriculture and still have enough exposure to the humanities
to give you much more than a very passing understanding. We're
impoverishing our students from what used to constitute the bulk
of knowledge about human beings.
Taken from: http://alumni.oregonstate.edu/stater/issues/stater0004/F_21-20Vision.html
A general liberal education has been a very important aspect
of education traditionally, and in state universities it is being
largely abandoned. You can major in history or major in English,
but you can't major in the sciences or engineering or forestry
or agriculture and still have enough exposure to the humanities
to give you much more than a very passing understanding. We're
impoverishing our students from what used to constitute the bulk
of knowledge about human beings.
There's a great book, which is taught in one of Bob's courses,
called Dr. Faustus by the German novelist Thomas Mann. It's a
novel about the German soul, and it's deeply historical in the
sense that it traces the history of the German culture from the
Middle Ages to the present.
Mann believes the reason Germany has been an unpredictable
part of the world in the last 75 years is because Germans had
less respect for the humanities and what he calls humane knowledge
and learning and too much respect for those things that Mann
said were least directly rooted in human life, namely the fruits
of imaginative investigation and enterprise--including science,
but also some of the higher arts such as music and mathematics.
According to Mann, and we think this is a viable part of the
interpretation of the Holocaust and the events of World War II,
this emphasis, which was not unique to Germany but stronger in
Germany than elsewhere, deprived the Germans of the vision of
human tolerance necessary for any society to function with a
strong sense of human dignity.
Mann contends that education is very important because it
has political consequences. The sciences and the arts are not
political by nature, but the humanities are deeply concerned
with human beings and the way they live their lives, including
politics and self-government. If the humanities are ignored and
all the emphasis put on science, a society risks skewing things
in the direction of inhumane life.
From a historical perspective, it's rather interesting to
compare the early 20th century to the early 21st century in terms
of the relative prestige of the sciences and humanities. Around
1900, electricity revolutionized the world, just as the computer
and Internet are doing so now. In the late 19th century, institutions
of higher education were committed to teaching the classics,
the humane classics as they were called, including philosophy
and languages and literature. As more and more science curriculum
was introduced, it wasn't long before the so called modern track
began to gain more prestige and the classic track had less prestige
and visibility in both American and European universities. Governments
began to realize that they had a stake in educating their citizens
scientifically because scientific and technical knowledge in
the long run benefited the state and increased its power.
Traditionally, the arts prosper in times of economic prosperity.
When there is money to be had and patronage to be given, people
give money to artistic foundations and organizations and can
spend money to go to performances and museums. During good times,
the arts do okay ... they limp along. But the problem is that
in bad times those things go belly up right away. They have no
endowment, no margin for survival, no government support in the
United States. Even though many European countries do support
and endow the arts rather generously, it is still a minuscule
part of the amount they allocate for support of technology and science.
Trying to find a balance between these two things is not an
easy matter, whether you're a pedagogue trying to teach your
students a balanced view of the world or a legislator sitting
in Washington trying to divide up the monetary pie. But it's
not just a question of equity, it's a question of the starvation--the
complete starvation--of one side and the enrichment of the other.
If we go 25 years down the road, and we hit a bump economically
and all the arts that operate according to private largesse and
generosity right now disappear, then the world will be a grimmer
place, a less humane place. We learn a lot from the arts about
tolerance and humanity and about ourselves that the sciences
don't teach us in the same way.
As state legislatures have cut support, public universities
have had to find other sources of financial support and have
turned increasingly to business. As a result, there is so much
emphasis on the so-called real world and preparing students for
the industrial and modernizing work force based on the Internet
and computers that some things are getting squeezed out. Pure
science is getting squeezed out a little bit and so are the humanities
and the arts because they don't have the same kind of industrial
or commercial base to which they can appeal for support.
A general liberal education has been a very important aspect
of education traditionally, and in state universities it is being
largely abandoned. You can major in history or major in English,
but you can't major in the sciences or engineering or forestry
or agriculture and still have enough exposure to the humanities
to give you much more than a very passing understanding. We're
impoverishing our students from what used to constitute the bulk
of knowledge about human beings.
Taken from: http://alumni.oregonstate.edu/stater/issues/stater0004/F_21-20Vision.html