What is “Humanities”?

Humanities in Québec's junior colleges.
 
     a personal perspective by granpawayne

What's "Humanities" all about, anyway?

The short answer.

It's all about us, the human community. We are not studying frogs, or gravity, or polynomial equations, we are studying aspects of our own reality and responsibility. We are studying them from a personal rather than an academic perspective. They are not meant to be job, career, or professional training, they are training for life.

The lengthy answer

Our society has created the Ministry of Education and we, as parents or as individuals, have passed to these elected governors the responsibility to oversee the formal transmission of understanding and values to succeeding generations. We have given them the authority to centralize, to organize, to manage, and to act as agents of efficiency and effectiveness in the collective task of educating the citizens of the future.

Our minister of education, on the advice of the community, has established the CEGEP's, collège d'enseignement général et professionnel, or junior colleges, for those of us who were young adults, -- who have the necessary money, talent, and ambition, -- to prepare us for university studies or to provide us with more short term career training.

The minister of education decided it would be a good idea, coming from the model of the traditional Catholic "collège classique, to have every one of us who went to these colleges study "Philosophie," including metaphysics (reality), epistemology (knowledge and truth), philosophical anthropology (the human condition), and axiology (ethical and aesthetic values).

But when it came to creating those junior colleges whose language of instruction would be English, the anglophone community took a slightly different direction. The anglophone community adopted a more multidisciplinary approach to insuring that our young adults would have the ability to do independent critical thinking, and be able to use this skill to sort out conflicting truth claims (knowledge), to situate themselves within the global community (worldviews), and to make sense of the value choices that confront them (ethics & social problems).

All of the disciplines in the traditional "humanities," which now encompass what we call the social sciences, arts and letters, require analytical research, critical thinking, and articulate expression as they study the human community; our cultures, our civilizations, our creative expression and our values. So in the anglophone colleges, the constellation of multidisciplinary courses called "Humanities" based on the traditional humanities were selected to replace the series of courses in "Philosophie" designed for those colleges whose language of instruction was French.

The word "humanities" was chosen as a name for these courses because the word has long been used, (since the 14th century according to Webster,) to refer to those studies which focus upon our human concerns and institutions; such as studies in history, society, philosophy, language, and culture. This use of the word "humanities" is often understood to be in contrast to the "sciences" of the objective physical, chemical, and biological aspects of nature and reality.

Why are they compulsory?

I believe that is because those people in government who manage such things, and those people in positions of power and influence within our economic, educational, and cultural institutions believe that since they are paying for the education of our young adults, they have a say in what they have to study.

Over the centuries young adults have been expected and required to study just such a curriculum as part of their preparation for assuming roles of leadership in society.

There is often pressure to eliminate such obligations in favor of concentrating on courses that apply to a specific job. The pressure comes from those that believe we go to school, especially college and university for job or career training.

Why do we go to college?

We go to college because we got the grades in high school to be able to apply. We go to college because its the thing to do. We go to college to get our parents off our backs, to socialize in a campus environment with no more hallway passes, no more notes from our parents, no more detentions. We go to college to learn, to study, to get an education, to get a college diploma, a diploma that will be accepted as proof that we know something. We get an education so that we will finally be able to make a decent living for ourselves. We may call it a job, a trade, a career, or a profession but it is what enables us to earn money with our knowledge, talent, and abilities. Money that we use to provide shelter, water, heat, food, clothing, and transportation for ourselves and those we share our lives with. Money that we also need to pay the tax collectors (federal, provincial, and municipal), when they come.

Why do we go to school?

We go to school,
so that we can get a diploma,
so that we can get a good job,
so that we can make lots of money,
so that we can be happy.

But . . . what is happiness, really? Can money buy it? Is the value of our job, its value to us or to society, determined solely by the salary we earn? If it is, does that mean that teachers are real losers? Who says we need a diploma to prove we're smart?

These are questions that probe our own grasp of truth, of reality, and of values. They are deeply human questions. Questions that struggle against confusion and ignorance. Questions that confront alienation and despair. Question that wrestle with skepticism (we can't know anything for sure), cynicism (suspicious of so called charitable motives), and nihilism (traditional values are a fraud and life has no meaning). "To be or not to be?" that is the question.

"Humanities" is the study of culture, of civilization and of values. They are studies of the human community that aim to give us some insight into where we are, when we are, what we are, why we are, and who we are; as individuals, as members of the human community, and as co-inhabitants with all other life forms of planet earth.

Why aren't we free to make our own choices about such courses?

Well, if ya wanna, ya hafta. If you want to get "certified by the Ministry of Education, you have to follow their program of studies. If I want to work with young adults as a teacher, I have to fulfill the teaching assignment they give me.

I am aware that these fundamentally human questions or human explorations have been "institutionalized" and turned into "obligatory courses" at the end of which one "gets a grade," and that I too have been "institutionalized," and turned into a "teacher" who "gives out grades." Yet it need not be fatal. The one who is "student" and the one who is "teacher" need not lose their souls to the institution.

Speaking for myself, I believe that we must not lose our souls to the institution. That would lead to dehumanization and alienation. We would exist for the institution rather than the institution existing for us. This is an ancient human problem. When it takes place, when the institution, whether it be church, state, nation or group, is understood to have an existence that transcends human individuals then we have some kind of mass hallucination. A thing, a human fabrication, is misunderstood as more real than life itself. When they are hallucinating, people begin to hear the voice of this "Thing," the state, the party, the church, ordering them to do all kinds of horrific, inhuman and dehumanizing things, in order that the "Thing" may be protected and preserved.

So, yes I am a teacher, but I understand myself to be a "de-institutionalized" teacher. That means that I work within the human community, and I work with the young adults of that community but if and when the "Thing" begins to intrude on our work in a dehumanizing way, then I resist and I encourage those I work with to resist. Resistance in the early stages, and this is important, is always easy but when the "Thing" becomes as monstrous as it was, for example, in Germany in 1939 under the illusion of the "Aryan Race," the "NAZI" Party, and Fatherland, resistance becomes very difficult and very dangerous.

So what is "Humanities all about, anyway? It's about making sure such things don't happen again.