Oh, The Humanities!

Every week there seems to be a new article published in some learned or intellectual journal reporting or lamenting the death of the humanities. Nobody sees much point in humanity any more. This does not strike me as a good sign.

Amazingly, a hundred and fifty years ago, formal education consisted of very little else. I have just been reading the biography of Thomas Arnold, the acknowledged founder of the English public (in both senses) school system, in Strachey's Eminent Victorians. What Arnold did at Rugby became the model not only for other English public schools, but also for the government schools then being instituted for the general public.

In Thomas's Rugby, no science was taught. Adding mathematics to the curriculum was Arnold's innovation.

So what was taught, and why? “That the classics should form the basis of all teaching was an axiom with Dr. Arnold,” writes Strachey. “Rather than have physical science the principal thing in my son's mind,” Arnold wrote in a letter, “I would gladly have him think that the sun went around the earth, and that the stars were so many spangles set in the bright blue firmament.” For all such stuff was trivia. “Surely the one thing needful for a Christian and an Englishman to study is Christian, moral, and political philosophy.” All philosophy, all the time.

Arnold's opinion was plainly shared by the general public of the day—the obvious proof of this is that they fell over each other trying to get their children into Rugby, and all other English public schools imitated this formula. In Tom Brown's Schooldays, Tom's father observes, “What is a child sent to school for? ... I don't care a straw for Greek participles, or the digamma... If he'll only turn out a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a Christian, that's all I want.”

This approach was not new with Arnold. Arnold was a “reformer,” but the essence of his reform was to return the schools to a high moral tone after a period of decline in this regard.

On assuming the post of headmaster of Rugby, Arnold also took Holy Orders to become an Anglican priest; the position was automatically a clerical one. Teachers were, first and foremost, “moralists,” as Hughes refers to them causally in Tom Brown's Schooldays, and Arnold's own chief contribution to the education of his charges was his Sunday sermon. Language was taught, not for the sake of being able to speak it—Arnold believed this could never be achieved in a school setting—but for the purpose of “forming the human mind in youth.” Understanding how a language worked was a useful proxy, the closest we had, for understanding how thought works. The classical and biblical stories studied, in turn, furnished the mind with important life lessons to be referred to from then on at any time of need.

The idea was to develop the whole person, to develop good judgement and good character, on the premise that this would allow him or her to rise to whatever particular demands might come.

The Confucian tradition in China started with exactly the same basic premise. The Analects preserve this basic principle: “A gentleman is not a tool.” A gentleman can always pick up and discard the specific tools needed for the specific task.

We now believe just about the opposite, that education should be practical training for a livelihood, and so all about practical skills in science, math, reading, and so forth. This is the essence of the current objection to the humanities: that they lead to no particular job at the other end.

They used to, of course: they used to lead to two particular jobs: teaching, and the clergy. They should still. But leave that aside; in the old days, the humanities were not for a job, but for a career; or rather, for a life.

Were our Victorian ancestors so completely wrong? They did reasonably well for themselves, after all, on an objective historical assessment. They managed, for example, to pull together the largest empire the world has ever known; collectively, the nations of Europe took over almost the entire globe in their day. Some, true, may call that a moral failure as much as a practical success; perhaps so, but we must not overlook the practical accomplishment. And so far as morals go, the Victorians also ended slavery and first developed stable representative democracy on a large scale. In their free time, despite their lack of basic training in engineering or science, they put together the Industrial Revolution and most of the groundwork of modern science. They vastly increased human material prosperity, particularly in Europe, but in truth worldwide.

Have we, in the Twentieth and Twenty-first centuries, done better? We should have—we have had the benefit of standing on their shoulders. We are richer than they were, materially; our technology is more advanced. But we have also lived, as they did not, through history's greatest mass murders and worst totalitarian governments, and the spiritual crisis of the postwar era which has seen unprecedented levels of mental illness. All the arts seem in decline, and the developed West as a whole is in absolute decline demographically. I think it is even fair to say that the end of our civilization almost seems in sight. We no longer believe, as the Victorians did, in the inevitable progress of mankind.

Perhaps, in the end, they were simply naive, and we know better. Otherwise, it rather looks as if they were right, and we are wrong.

The Victorians themselves were in no doubt that their success sprang directly from their educational system. “The Battle of Waterloo,” Wellington famously observed, “was won on the playing fields of Eton.” Tom Brown's Schooldays refers to the products of the English school system being “scattered over the whole empire on which the sun never sets, and whose general diffusion I take to be the chief cause of that empire's stability.” “For centuries, in their quiet, dogged, homespun way, they have been subduing the earth in most English counties, and leaving their mark in American forests and Australian uplands.”

Hughes, the author of Tom Brown's Schooldays, goes on to describe what he sees as the recognizable characteristics of a product of the Victorian English public school. They could argue fiercely, yet retain love and respect for their adversary; “no failures knock them up, or make them hold their hands”; they “go on believing and fighting to a green old age”; “failures slide off them like July rain off a duck's back feathers.”

Was the author wrong in making these claims? Surely all of us have noticed, as I have, that having gone to a certain school often makes a difference in a personality. And surely the attributes the author describes fit perfectly a particularly admirable type of English character, a Winston Churchill or a Margaret Thatcher—neither of whom were yet born when this description was written.

That's what the humanities can do; albeit the particular ideals and virtues developed may vary depending on the education's emphasis.

And it seems almost systematically what our current culture now lacks, and needs: that sense of optimism despite current setbacks; that sense of a purpose and a mission in life; that sense of a responsibility to the future; and, perhaps first and foremost, that sense of fair play and common courtesy towards an adversary.

Even from a purely practical standpoint, the case for this educational approach seems stronger today than it ever was in Victoria's day. As has often been rightly noted, technology and the social circumstances it produces are changing so fast that the practical skills and specific information we learn in grade school now—or even as a university undergrad--are likely to be of little or no use to us by the time we are in the workforce, let alone by the time we retire. All that drill at multiplication and long division is rather less useful now that we can all do quick calculations on our cell phones. All that memorization of dates and events matters less when we can Google a fact instantly in the same way. All that sweat at declining French irregular verbs is soon going to be rather less useful as our cell phones also instantly translate.

Devoting long years to purely practical education is, in essence, wasting our children's time.

What we need is people who have a proper sense of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of what the point of it all is, and of sense and nonsense. We need gentlemen, not tools. The tool is the computer.

How did we get it backwards? The educational model apparently flipped over in about the nineteen teens or twenties. The highly influential writer Charles Bobbit, in 1912, sought quite explicitly to apply the newly efficient procedures of industry to the schools. Ford's assembly line could be usefully transferred to education. Students were little manufactured products, and the process of their manufacture could be both standardized and accelerated, deliberately to meet the needs of industry or the state.

Woodrow Wilson, for one, was admirably blunt: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."

One wonders how much this change of focus has in turn produced the modern world. Abraham Lincoln once observed that “the philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation is the philosophy of government in the next.” Count one generation from 1912, and we have Fascism, Stalinism, Skinnerian behaviourism, and the idea that the individual exists for the benefit of industry or the state. Count two, and we have the tumult of the Sixties, perhaps a direct revolt, if perhaps hopelessly misdirected, against these views.

Is it still possible to reverse this decline? Perhaps not; another generation may well be too late, given that we have largely stopped reproducing, and the worst of it is that we do not yet seem even to be looking in the right direction. The humanities are still declining, indeed apparently now in free-fall. Current ideas of educational reform cluster around standardized testing; yet any thing that can be clearly measured on a standardized test is a thing ripe for computerization.

We desperately need to rediscover the human. If we do not, the culture that first does will bury us.