20100610.0941

This article was pointed out by one of my Facebook friends--and an esteemed colleague from my graduate institution. It links to this article and this one. While I do not agree with the particulars of the articles (and Stanley Fish is a controversial figure, if a decidedly influential one), in their general thrust--education in the humanities is a damned good thing--I am very much aligned with them.

I have been giving thought to much the same issue recently (yes, I know it smacks of "Me, too," but I have been doing so), though from a slightly different angle. Some occurrences in my classes of late, as well as the readings I continue to do, have prompted it. And I have long been driven by a more personal concern in this regard.

I come from a hard-working family. Those who have already heard me talk about it know that the parts of my family with whom I have spent any appreciable amount of time are all very much in the working class. My father has been working in HVAC for something like twenty years. My mother worked in grocery stores for most of my growing up, and now is employed as a tax preparer. One of the few cousins I talk to is a school janitor. His mother manages an elementray school cafeteria. His father does automotive work. Hell, I spent my summers and school holidays from sixth grade up through high school doing electrical and other construction work (around other jobs once I turned sixteen and could do "real" work).

I come from solid, salt-of-the-earth working-folk. They value education, certainly--Dad's father taught music for close to forty years, for example--and they are very much pleased with me that I have taken the opportunity to study as I have. But they do not really understand what it is that I do.

For years, now, I have been trying to figure out a way to explain it to them. And I think that Roth's article addresses the point to a great degree.

But the thing that my students did that brought the issue to mind for me:

I am teaching two sections of remedial reading this summer. It is hardly the first time that I have done so, and I have found that aligning all of my reading examples around a central theme helps (yes, this policy is derived from the Freshman English Office at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, for which I did my first college teaching). Because I am working on a dissertation in Arthurian literature (and I know I need to be working harder at it), this summer's examples are coming largely from discussions of Malory.

Several students in both classes asked me where they could get a copy of the text.

It is always flattering when students show interest in the instructor's interests.

When they asked, there came up in class a discussion of why studying "the old shit" is worthwhile. Malory provides an easy example; it does much of the same stuff that contemporary entertainment media do. Le Morte d'Arthur could easily become a Quentin Tarantino movie (if he makes one, remember that I pointed it out). And we talked about jokes popping up, among other things.

But there are other reasons than the simple entertainment value (which is considerable and a fine reason to look at the materials to begin with). As has been pointed out, engagement with an object of study at a level of personal interest is the beginning of scholarship. And any created object reflects something of the circumstances in which it was created--which includes the creator. Studying the works of people is studying people, and the study of people is a worthwhile endeavor for any of us.

I am not going to make the case that study of the humanities is superior to the study of the "hard" disciplines such as chemistry and engineering. I benefit quite a bit from those studies, so it would be ill of me to badmouth them. But I will assert that not producing an immediate, obvious benefit is not the same as not producing a benefit. "Hidden" does not mean "nonexistent."

Ask a ninja.

And it is true that picking apart Shakespeare's sonnets does not cure disease. Tracing the metrical structure of Beowulf does not harness and transmit electrical power. Explicating the Arthurian influences upon works of contemporary fantasy literature does not suck pollutants out of the atmosphere. Nor does scanning screenplays for their Marxist overtones clean the oil leaked into the Gulf (though the engineers aren't exactly doing well at it, either).

What doing such things does, what studying the humanities and the arts does, is allow people to examine the cultural products and histories in which we are all embedded. It permits examination of the prevailing attitudes at work in various times and places--attitudes of which people may well not be aware, but again, that a person is unaware of a thing hardly means that the thing is not there. It lets us look at why we do the things we do.

It allows us to better understand what it is to be human.