The Value of the Humanities for the 21st Century

Key themes for educating your child

The Perception and Articulation of Human Characteristics

I’ve been having regular Socratic conversations with the five year old daughter of Oz Nova, an entrepreneur who creates Stanford level CS coursework based on actually writing code for a living. He and his wife Katherine are homeschooling his daughters As a world-class CS guy, he is fully confident of what to do for STEM. But he has been asking me about what to do for Humanities.

At five, she is already reading J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, Roald Dahl’s books, Nancy Drew mysteries, etc. I’ve been asking her questions about the different styles of the authors, about the world building that they do, her opinion regarding the characters’ motivations and moral qualities, and generally getting her to think and talk about the distinctive literary universes in which she is immersed. The questions are challenging for her, but she often pauses to think about sensible answers to such questions. For most families, to have a child reading at that level and quantity at that age is already the biggest possible win. I’m simply adding a layer of reflection and sophistication of understanding by asking her questions she hadn’t thought of before (as well as adding my take on some of the questions, so that it is a sincere two way conversation).

I loathed “Language Arts” in school because it struck me as a combination of useless exercises along with meaningless questions about literature that destroyed the pleasure of reading. Now with decades as an educator, I realize that some students do need some “clean up” with respect to spelling, punctuation, grammar, usage, etc. That said, the amount of time that a particular child might need on this aspect of learning to write well varies widely; some children need a lot and others almost none at all. This aspect should be personalized to the child and software apps exist that can allow for customized learning to polish basic writing mechanics. But with or without software, I see this aspect as mostly trivial.

The “meaningless questions about literature” aspect I still abhor when I encounter it in textbooks. But in real life, we are constantly talking about our perceptions of situations and people. While some do so in a gossipy way, it is incredibly valuable in real life to be able to share a perception of a particular organizational culture, or a leader’s leadership style, or of a colleague’s perceived strengths and weaknesses.

“How is Apple different from Microsoft?” is just another “compare and contrast” question that seemed stupid in a language arts classroom. That is, we are always talking about people and the things people create, and some of us are more articulate and perceptive with respect to how we do so. Ideally discussions of literature help young people become more thoughtful, articulate, and perceptive with respect to their observations and sharing of human experiences.

Relatedly they become aware of and articulate a wider range of human experience than they might have done on their own. Once while reading the incredibly self-conscious and insecure narrator of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground with a group of 9th graders, one student announced, “There is no way that someone could actually feel like this on the inside.” A classmate replied, “I feel like this every day.” He was appropriately stunned, his experience of his reality appropriately altered by understanding that a classmate could be living such a different internal experience.

Working Towards Developing a Consistent and Coherent Understanding of the World

At five, she is focused on literary works. But gradually children are able to develop philosophically as well. While I see this process happening continuously through childhood, it enters a period of acceleration in puberty. There I see the core task as helping children develop consistent, coherent understandings of reality and their place in it.

This is a TALL order. Essentially all of the intellectual content of Western civilization consists of the articulation and competition among competing understandings of reality, most of which have been subjected to the mutual expectation of consistency and coherence (e.g. Aquinas’ struggle to reconcile Aristotle with Scripture).

Obviously a child will not recapitulate all of Western civilization. But she should begin to think through how and what she know what she knows (the True), what is moral and ethical and what is not and why (the Good), and what is honorable and worthy of respect or awe and what is not (the Noble or Beautiful). This is a process that should take place steadily and gradually over many years, and ultimately a lifetime.

It is helpful to ground such explorations through exposure to key founding documents in Western civilization, including Greek authors such as Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, and more along with key books from the Old and New Testament. The goal is to engage with the thought of the authors as another human being, not to “teach” the documents as scholarly objects from the distant past. “Hey, can you imagine feeling the rage that Achilles felt?” We don’t want to crush children’s spirits with the marble fingers of the ancients.

While it is valuable for teens to become familiar with key authors and texts, I see the larger project as helping students to begin to perceive the broad contours of Western civilization. Thus the themes of reason, individuality, and virtue are among the themes that become visible in Greek literature, monotheism, obedience to the law, and piety in the Judeo-Christian tradition. These themes are lifelong organizing principles, both for one’s own life as well as one’s understanding of the tradition in which we are embedded.

With more advanced study into high school and beyond, students should learn to understand the long arc of Western Civilization, including the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Modernity. These should not be themes that they read about in history books, but as much as possible lived experiences by means of engaging with key authors who express key ideas. Do they agree or disagree with Augustine? Aquinas? Pico della Mirandola? Machiavelli? Shakespeare? Hobbes? and so forth.

The point of such a “Great Books” education is not to worship the classics - any healthy student may indeed loathe the beliefs of some of the authors. But it is precisely by taking seriously the beliefs of such radically different perspectives that a young person learns the most important lesson from the liberal arts, to transcend the parochialism of time and place. Should we take Aristotle’s concept of “natural slavery” seriously? Was Aquinas correct that heretics should be put to death? Although both abhorrent by today’s standards, we should learn the full range of beliefs that were held in the past and with what justifications.

But more than the details of the rich and complex history of Western civilization, students should begin to explore their own epistemological, moral, and aesthetic/spiritual commitments. Thus the centrality of Socratic discussions in our process, where the child is always being asked to reflect and develop her own understandings of the true, the good, and the noble/beautiful.

Eventually their reflections should be informed through the study of political philosophy and political economy, which are advanced topics. At The Socratic Experience we offer a senior level course on Philosophy, Politics, and Economics that introduces students to Hazlitt, Hayek, public choice theory, and other intellectual tools that help them to understand the phenomenon of governance and the sources of prosperity (this list, originally inspired by a conversation I had with entrepreneur Brendan McCord, has many excellent wide ranging suggestions).

Civilizations Beyond the West

Liah Greenfeld makes the case that there are three distinctive civilizations that prevail in our time:

1. Monotheism (Western civilization).

2. Confucian civilization.

3. Hindu civilization.

She acknowledges that there are significant differences among the monotheistic branches, e.g. Judaism, the Christian West, the Orthodox East, and Islam, yet their commonality based on the underlying Abrahamic tradition results in a common civilizational substrate.

Likewise although the specific cultures of various nations, ethnicities, and tribes in East Asia vary, the single dominant influence is an ancient Confucian culture, leavened with Taoism, Buddhism, and other strands. The Asian subcontinent, despite invasions from Islam in the north, and countless subcultures across the continent, retains an ancient Hindu substrate that binds them together.

Students should learn something about each of these civilizational paradigms and how different they are from the standard Western civilizational assumptions that most of us reading this take for granted. It is the water in which we swim. What is life like from within a culture that does not focus so much on individuality? What if one lives within a culture in which family obligations are taken very seriously? What if one is not responsible for creating one’s own personal identity?

There are, of course, countless smaller animistic traditions as well as larger distinctive traditions (e.g. Zoroastrian, Tibetan Buddhist, etc.), but most of the world’s population is largely Abrahamic (e.g. most of Africa is now Christian or Muslim, Latin America is almost entirely Christian, etc.), Confucian, or Hindu. Therefore these are the primary traditions we should focus on understanding to learn about the bulk of the world’s population.

The cultural consolidation due to digital communications is largely accelerating the homogenization of peoples around the world into these primary civilizational groupings. Many indigenous languages and cultures are rapidly going extinct as younger generations are absorbed into one of the dominant global civilizations.

Understanding Culture and Language

In addition to Greenfeld’s distinct civilizations, we should all learn to understand other cultures. This is often productively integrated into the study of foreign languages, where learning about the culture facilitates learning the language and learning the language may be a requirement for properly understanding another culture.

Understanding the Past and How Our World Was Shaped

Once young people have some sense of the extraordinary range of culture and belief across time and space, then the development of different traditions becomes more meaningful as well. Once they realize that their identity today is the result of the particular paths that their parents, their culture and language, their governments, and so forth have taken in the past, they begin to perceive the value of understanding where it all came from. While one can “teach” history in an entertaining, jingoistic, or chauvinistic manner, I prefer to connect it directly to the child’s identity, helping them to understand how everything around them is the result of particular events in the past.

Mytho-Poetic Understandings

It is also important to develop some understanding of the mythopoetic roots of human understanding, including narrative structure. One doesn’t need to go full on Jung/Campbell to acknowledge that there is something to the notion of a Hero’s Journey as a fundamental human archetype. Given human evolution, it would not be surprising that snakes carry a negative connotation in many cultures around the world.

And what are we to make of the power of dreams? Of myths? Of stories? Of poetry? Why do some kinds of human expression seem to resonate with many people? What aspects of human narrative are culturally and/or civilizationally dependent, vs. what aspects may be rooted in a universal human psychology? Why do people around the world have religion? Why music?

Here again, the point is not to instill a dogma - it is to acknowledge that systems of meaning and modes of expression drive much of human experience and behavior. It will be an ongoing task for each human being to make sense of their own world of experience in light of the cultural and meaning systems in which they are embedded.

Attending to One’s Cultural Milieu

In today’s world, those cultural and meaning systems include one’s family, neighbors, associates, and a distributed network of people and virtual experiences from around the world. There is no external “lesson” that can make sense of one’s own experience and integrate it all into a meaningful life plan. Each individual child must do this work for herself.

But in order to do so, it is essential that children gradually learn to understand that their own consciousness and understanding of themselves is the result of the cultural substrate in which they are embedded. We therefore have an obligation, insofar as we can control it, to embed them in healthy and positive cultural substrates. Parents and educators should be scrupulous about the cultural influences which most saturate their children’s experiences (beyond the obviously horrible influences, beware of educators who constantly teach their children that the world is a terrible place).

I would describe the carelessness of most home, schooling, and media environments as pouring sewage into a child’s milk every morning. As Liah Greenfeld points out in Mind, Modernity, and Madness, “Mind is Culture, Culture is Mind.” Each human mind is much more a product of our surrounding culture than most of us realize. Our minds are literally inseparable from the cultures in which we are immersed. Do your best to not to put sewage in your child’s milk.

(see also Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare, which develops a neuroscientific and evolutionary account of how consciousness arose from the combination of brains and symbolic culture in which we are all immersed, a different validation of Greenfeld’s insight that “mind is culture and culture is mind.” Every word you read on this page, every thought that goes through your brain, is essentially an artifact of the cultures with which you use to make meaning on a moment by moment basis).

Writing

Writing is thinking. Writing is thinking. Writing is thinking.

Your child should be constantly thinking with you in almost every conversation they have with you (or their educators). Gradually, voracious readers who engage in extensive intellectual dialogue want to organize their thoughts so they can share them with others. My favorite description of this is that a writer becomes so full of thought they need to write as much as a cow with full udders needs to be milked.

Your child’s mind should be so full of thought and so rich with intellectual engagement that the ideas for narrative or essays eventually need to spill out of them. Of course coach and mentor and organize and debate and edit and all the things so that their written expressions become ever more compelling and worth reading. When they know they are writing for a public audience (get them doing Amazon reviews in public of books and products they like from a young age), they should care about presentation in just the same way that no one wants to leave the house with soup stains all over one’s shirt.

And those of who have something that we want to say find GPT writing to be embarrassing garbage, much like soup stains all over our shirts before going out on an important date. NOOOO!!!!!!

Know Thyself

Thus the ultimate humanistic education is the Socratic “Know thyself.” Who am I and what do I mean to myself and those around me? How can I contribute value to the world? What is it that I need to live a vibrant life? What are the external influences and pressures that interfere with my ability to live a well lived life?

An important corollary to the latter question is an awareness of the extent to which culture and meaning systems have created who we are and thus who we will become. I want young people to become significantly more intentional about their relationships, their media and social media consumption, their beliefs, where they focus their attention, and so forth. Ideally they develop the ability to become intentional regarding each of the steps below in the context of a fully develop understanding of who they are today and who they want to become in the future:

Watch your thoughts. They become words.

Watch your words. They become deeds.

Watch your deeds. They become habits.

Watch your habits. They become character.

Character is everything.

This is the core educational experience we aspire to offer at The Socratic Experience. I describe it as “the conscious development of personal identity.” To be done properly, it should include at least some version of all of the earlier elements of a humanistic education described above.

If one wants to continue into a deeper humanistic education, all of the elements above are susceptible to endless depth and sophistication. Mountains of scholarly efforts have gone into each. These projects will continue indefinitely into the future because their ongoing living interpretation is co-equal with human experience itself.

And yet fundamentally, short of a scholarly career, the value of the humanities is neither scholarly inquiry nor worship of any tradition or set of books or values. It is setting us each on a better path to “How should we live our life?”

Ultimately the humanities are valuable for helping each of us to live a more fulfilling life through understanding ourselves and others more effectively. If they are not doing that, then they are worthless.