22 January 2011

obviously, the government is responsible

The context for the following are massive upheavals in the UK in the way that university education and the health and social systems are funded and administered. Read: decimation. By the start of the next school term universities will no longer be notionally free to domestic students and there's about 5 people in all of England who think that the newly legislated changes to the national health service are a good idea.

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"Don't get me wrong, I care deeply for the humanities and believe they have a vital role to play in a healthy society. I just think that the way culture is currently taught in universities is a travesty of its real potential, and that the government cuts are an understandable, if not at all nice, consequence of the failure of current teaching methods and goals."

"It should be the job of a university education to tease out the therapeutic and illuminative aspects of culture, so that we can emerge from a period of study as slightly less disturbed, selfish, unempathetic and blinkered human beings, who can be of greater benefit not only to the economy, but also to our friends, our children and our spouses."

"The contemporary guardians of culture have a habit of cudgelling anyone who might try to use culture for didactic ends or to open a subject up to a mass audience. When confronted by those who demand of culture that it should be relevant and useful, that it should offer up advice on how to choose a career or survive the end of a marriage, how to contain sexual impulses or cope with the news of a medical death sentence, the guardians of culture become very disdainful. "

"We have implicitly charged our higher-education system with a dual and possibly contradictory mission, to teach us how to make a living and to teach us how to live. And we have left the second of these two aims recklessly vague and unattended."


"[universities] are fatefully in love with ambiguity, they trust in the absurd modernist doctrine that great art should have no moral content or desire to change its audience. "


The debate is not new . . . but the full piece by philosopher Alain de Botton (here) is worth a read.

3 comments:

c-dog said...

Man, that guy is so good. Cool stuff Caldwell, cool stuff.

cara said...

This post really resonates, as it is the stuff that I think about most days: what is schooling for?
What is school?

Pertinent questions, and although I would disagree with Alain De Botton on some levels-a liberal arts education is NOT therapy- I do agree that it should make the people who are able to participate in this type of education better people, more able to solve problems and it should lead to personal development.

The problem is that I worry that Mr. De Botton wants academics to answer the question: Why are the Humanities important? in a way that might be counter productive.
What the humanities are good for may not be what society or governments currently value.
Further, I would counter, Why are the Humanities not important?
I daresay, that the answer to this question may prove more illuminating.

Lorne Roberts said...

interesting article. quite relevant for me since i'm presently studying beowulf and wondering how this will play out in my life, beyond getting a job teaching it in turn to undergrads...