Brooks, Fish and Classical Education
A couple of days ago, David Brooks made the argument for studying the humanities even in this economic climate, when having a practical skill—Brooks offers accounting as an example– seems most likely to get you a job.
Studying the humanities improves your ability to read and write. No matter what you do in life, you will have a huge advantage if you can read a paragraph and discern its meaning (a rarer talent than you might suppose). You will have enormous power if you are the person in the office who can write a clear and concise memo.
Brooks makes an argument for cultural literacy (and for learning facts) that E.D. Hirsch, Jr. offers –though it’s not Hirsch’s only argument—in The Knowledge Deficit.
Brooks says:
Studying the humanities will give you a wealth of analogies. People think by comparison — Iraq is either like Vietnam or Bosnia; your boss is like Narcissus or Solon. People who have a wealth of analogies in their minds can think more precisely than those with few analogies. If you go through college without reading Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon, you’ll have been cheated out of a great repertoire of comparisons.
And then there’s the matter of the study of the humanities helping you to “befriend The Big Shaggy.” Brooks explains:
Let me try to explain. Over the past century or so, people have built various systems to help them understand human behavior: economics, political science, game theory and evolutionary psychology. These systems are useful in many circumstances. But none completely explain behavior because deep down people have passions and drives that don’t lend themselves to systemic modeling. They have yearnings and fears that reside in an inner beast you could call The Big Shaggy….
You can see The Big Shaggy at work when a governor of South Carolina suddenly chucks it all for a love voyage south of the equator, or when a smart, philosophical congressman from Indiana risks everything for an in-office affair….
Those are the destructive sides of The Big Shaggy. But this tender beast is also responsible for the mysterious but fierce determination that drives Kobe Bryant, the graceful bemusement the Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga showed when his perfect game slipped away, the selfless courage soldiers in Afghanistan show when they risk death for buddies or a family they may never see again….
But over the centuries, there have been rare and strange people who possessed the skill of taking the upheavals of thought that emanate from The Big Shaggy and representing them in the form of story, music, myth, painting, liturgy, architecture, sculpture, landscape and speech. These men and women developed languages that help us understand these yearnings and also educate and mold them. They left rich veins of emotional knowledge that are the subjects of the humanities.
Meanwhile, in the same newspaper, on the same day, Stanley Fish weighed in on the virtues of a classical education and the value it has for kids from all backgrounds. He’s remembering the education received at Classical High School in Providence, RI.
When I attended, offerings and requirements included four years of Latin, three years of French, two years of German, physics, chemistry, biology, algebra, geometry, calculus, trigonometry, English, history, civics, in addition to extra-curricular activities, and clubs — French Club, Latin Club, German Club, Science Club, among many others. A student body made up of the children of immigrants or first generation Americans; many, like me, the first in their families to finish high school. Nearly a 100 percent college attendance rate. A yearbook that featured student translations from Virgil and original poems in Latin.
Fish offers brief reviews of three new books that also champion learning the classics.
Reviewing The Core: Teaching Your Child the Foundations of Classical Education by Leigh A. Bortins, what sounds to me like the old idea that there’s a great conversation that’s been going on for centuries in the educated world and kids must be prepared to enter into it:
To this end, she proposes a two-pronged program of instruction: “classical education emphasizes using the classical skills to study classical content.” By classical skills she means imitation, memorization, drill, recitation and above all grammar, not grammar as the study of the formal structure of sentences (although that is part of it), but grammar as the study of the formal structure of anything: “Every occupation, field of study or concept has a vocabulary that the student must acquire like a foreign language . . . . A basketball player practicing the fundamentals could be considered a grammarian . . . as he repeatedly drills the basic skills, of passing dribbling, and shooting.” “Every student,” Bortins counsels, “must learn to speak the language of the subject.”
Next he deals with Martha C. Nussbaum’s Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities which seems to be on the right track. Unfortunately, it looks like her emphasis is more on world citizenship than on education for democracy in America or on any understanding of American’s uniqueness and exceptionalism:
For Nussbaum, human development means the development of the capacity to transcend the local prejudices of one’s immediate (even national) context and become a responsible citizen of the world. Students should be brought “to see themselves as members of a heterogeneous nation . . . and a still more heterogeneous world, and to understand something of this history of the diverse groups that inhabit it.” Developing intelligent world citizenship is an enormous task that can not even begin to be accomplished without the humanities and arts that “cultivate capacities for play and empathy,” encourage thinking that is “flexible, open and creative” and work against the provincialism that too often leads us to see those who are different as demonized others.
Finally is Diane Ravitch’s much-talked-about The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education. Ravitch worries that No Child Left Behind’s emphasis on math and reading scores has resulted in schools narrowing the curriculum
I think the narrowed curriculum says more about the lack of imagination of schools and teachers than it does about the legislation itself. After all, you can teach reading from a science book, a history book or a book of poems. Hirsch’s Core Curriculum, for instance, doesn’t teach reading as a separate subject. Reading is done in the content areas–including history, geography, science and literature. And schools that use the Core Curriculum do very well on all state states, even though it’s not specifically aligned with the curriculum of any of them.
Fish on Ravitch’s book:
Ravitch’s recommendations are simple, commonsensical and entirely consonant with the views of Bortins and Nussbaum. Begin with “a well conceived, coherent, sequential curriculum,” and then “adjust other parts of the education system to support the goals of learning.” This will produce a “foundation of knowledge and skills that grows stronger each year.” Forget about the latest fad and quick-fix, and buckle down to the time-honored, traditional “study and practice of the liberal arts and sciences: history, literature, geography, the sciences, civics, mathematics, the arts and foreign languages.”
Fish concludes:
In short, get knowledgeable and well-trained teachers, equip them with a carefully calibrated curriculum and a syllabus filled with challenging texts and materials, and put them in a room with students who are told where they are going and how they are going to get there.
The current argument for a classical education reminds me a couple of things.
As Freeman Butts noted in his old-but-still-valuable A History of Education in American Culture, American education has repeatedly returned to the idea that having scientific or technological knowledge isn’t enough. People need to know how to use that information in a humane way. In the history of American education, this has usually meant a reconsideration of moral education in schools.
And if the ideas expounded by Brooks and Fish sound somehow familiar—as they do to me—you might be reminded of Mortimer Adler’s Padeia Program. Adler argued that a good classical education was the best way to educate kids from all walks of life to prepare them for participation in a democratic society.
Lots more discussion at Flypaper, Eduwonk and Joanne Jacobs.
Interesting comments on Brooks here.
