Why Humanities
International Writing Program
Iowa City, Iowa
28 April 2005
It is a real pleasure to be here before you to discuss the humanities and their importance in education – the education of all our students, whether inclined toward mathematics, the sciences and technology or history and the arts. And I would like to think ofthe humanities in broad terms, namely “the study of languages, literature, history, and philosophy; the history of criticism and theory of art and music; as well as the creative and performing arts and those aspects of social sciences that have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods.” I think the Commission on the Humanities has defined it as such.
From all the comments I hear, I think many are as concerned as I am about the fundamental misunderstanding of educational aims. John Dewey wrote that "The aim of education should be to teach the child to think, not what to think." And the late Ernest Boyer of the Carnegie Foundation said that "To be truly educated means going beyond the isolated facts, putting learning in a larger context, and, above all, discovering the connectedness of things." It is the connections - the "aha's!" or that integration of intellectual concept and gut understanding - which the humanities provide so powerfully.
Add to this, the ideas of Dr. Howard Gardner in his book, "Frames of Mind," in which he states that we learn not just through the linguistic and mathematical methods of traditional schooling but through seven intelligences: logical/mathematical and verbal/linguistic of course, but also visual/spatial, kinesthetic/movement, musical/rhythmic, social/interpersonal, and intrapersonal, or the art of self evaluation. .
Further scientific probing has added weight to this thesis. Neurologists are now able to watch the mind at work through the use of highly sophisticated equipment. They have found that vision and hearing are direct forms of understanding, not subservient to reason or intellect. To couch this thought in terms of daily life, have you ever looked at and been deeply affected by a piece of theater, a novel, a painting, a musical composition, or a dance - and not been able to convey that affect or meaning to another person through words? Not all learning can be conveyed or expressed through words, but we have been so conditioned to think of education in verbal/numerical terms that we feel inadequate when we cannot put all teaching or instruction into words. Ernest Boyer in his last book stated that the single most essential element of elementary education is language, and his definition of language is communication, which includes all the art forms. Now how does that translate into meaningful education? Gardner focuses on education as understanding, or the application of knowledge and concepts in new situations for which that knowledge is appropriate.
This actually sounds a good deal easier than it is in practice. Well educated teen age students have been known to state emphatically that they of course know that the earth is round, but when questioned about why it doesn't look round where we live, they respond that they live on the part that is flat. And college graduates have insisted that a shot put ball will hit the ground sooner than a tennis ball when dropped together from on high even though they were taught in the 7th grade that the rate of speed of any dropping object depends on gravity, not on weight. The only way to overcome this five-year-old mentality is through generative ideas, through multiple approaches to the same theme, through ongoing assessments of student work which maintains dialogue as a means of testing. What better way to enrich conceptual learning than through the humanities. In other words a student learns something meaningful in a creative writing or art class, music lessons, theater and dance as well as in science and math – meaningful beyond the specific lesson involved..
Research following the theory of multiple intelligences has found that children do not merely "absorb" or "memorize" knowledge; they "construct" it through at least one, but usually more than one intelligence. This word "construct" is the key here because it clearly implies that students, in order to learn, must participate in the process. Now any parent who has tried to prevent a child from making a mistake by issuing a verbal warning knows how true this rings.
Children naturally learn by doing, participating, experimenting, not by only memorizing in a place that might bill itself as an educational institution but sometimes feels more like a fact-ory! Please understand that I am not in any way trying to dismiss memorization as useless. Memorization of poetry can add to understanding, and of putting certain facts to memory saves time looking them up, and memorization of basic mathematical processes is essential. I just want to stress that understanding requires more than just winding oneself up and spewing out the data stored. Let me give you some examples.
An art teacher took her high school class to a ceramics exhibition and asked the students to describe three pieces of interest to them. When she read the papers, she was surprised at how poorly they “saw” the objects. It was clear that they just didn’t notice the details, and this concerned her because surrounding colors, shapes and contours have a significant effect on a person even when not consciously aware of it. She showed the results to the English teacher, and they decided to combine forces and get students to focus on these details in both their visual and verbal work. The result was a significant improvement in both their writing skills and their artistic achievements.
In the Appalachian mountains a photographer started working with young people in an attempt to give them a better appreciation of their community and culture. He first taught them how to use still cameras and camcorders as a way to capture their attention. Then he gave them an important assignment: find local heroes, interview them or their survivors and write about their impact on the community and on themselves as individuals. The results amazed even the man who started the program. Teenagers who had shown no interest in schooling became avid researchers, historians who came to know more about their region than their elders. They became real students.
Then there was the science class in a junior high school in Washington, DC, which won prizes consistently for its work even though the students were not handpicked; they were inner city children, a large percentage of whom were classified as "at risk" students. The only discernible difference in this class was that the teacher insisted that his students draw whatever forms they were studying. Whether seen through a microscope or with the naked eye, each student had to reproduce each life form accurately. It is not possible for me to prove that this extra method of observation through drawing is what made them better science students, but I was struck by the feeling of involvement, of participation whenever I visited the class.
In a Midwestern high school, a chemistry teacher turned to dance. Her class was required to create a dance representing the transformation of dna and rna, and the students became so involved in the process that they also created costumes, rented a strobe light and videotaped the performance. At the end they enthusiastically claimed that they understood and remembered the lesson so much better thanks to the act of combining movement with memorization of the concept.
In other words, when the humanities become an essential part of the education of future mathematicians, scientists and doctors as well as historians and writers and business people, it does more than just enrich their lives. It gives them a deeper understanding of their subject and encourages them to look for more creative approaches to their work.
One final piece of research I would like to mention came to me while I was Director of The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. Shirley Brice Heath, a Professor at Stamford University, found, on the basis of her ten-year study, that arts and humanities programs outside of school are effective teaching mechanisms for young people placed at high risk through their environment. These programs span all aesthetic domains. The key question was: what happens in community-based organizations that can draw young people to sustained participation, performance and productions that both they and external critics judge to be of high quality? Young people in these programs showed remarkable outcomes - this in spite of the fact that on the basis of a “risk index” of 8 factors pertaining to violence in school and neighborhood, domestic instability and economic deprivation, young people drawn to these programs emerged as those with the highest risk index of all three groups. In spite of this finding, they were:
In sum, the humanities and the arts promote cognitive, linguistic, social, and managerial capacities. They can translate into a means of income for youth, not necessarily in the field they studied. Few in fact see themselves making a living as writers or artists, but they welcome the knowledge of work opportunities and social entrepreneurship possibilities around these fields - from education to the study and recording of local history, from administration to production assistance.
I could carry on about the why’s and how’s of this process, but what is most meaningful to me is the reaction of the students themselves. The projects they worked on were more ‘real’ than anything else in their lives. One talked about the work, whether writing, acting or painting, literally as a form of identity construction: “When you do something where you create, it builds something inside you that never really goes away,” he said. And a director of one of the theater projects also spoke eloquently of the effects of these programs: “There is no way to fast forward and know how the kids will look back on this, but I have seen the joy in their eyes and have heard it in their voices. I have watched them work hard and then take a bow and come up taller.”
The humanities was what Claude Debussy was thinking of when he said that the mystery of the forest cannot be expressed by “measuring the height of trees” and what e.e.cummings meant when he wrote that nothing measurable matters “a very good god damn.” Saul Bellow demonstrated that the soul of a city such as Chicago can really come to life in a work of fiction as in “Herzog”, far more than in a recitation of its historical facts and figures.
The humanities gave Albert Einstein the wings to fly on a beam of light as he developed the theory of relativity, and it was what Senator J. William Fulbright was referring to when he wrote in his last book, The Price of Empire, “Creative leadership and liberal education, which in fact go together, are the first requirements for a hopeful future for humankind.”