Put humanity back into learning
Science is consuming the education dollar while history, philosophy and the arts are being starved, writes Pete Hay
WE need science. It is the basis of our knowledge systems, and it provides, via its translation into technologies, the institutional fabric of civilisation.
That it is under serious threat is no small thing — and it is under threat, its very claim to be the supplier of the basic building blocks of knowledge rejected by a range of evidence denying, faith-based knowledge “stories”, the most potent of which, that of politically charged fundamentalist Christianity, reaches all the way to the White House.
Against this threat, science must be staunchly defended, and beyond the level of ideological rhetoric, down where basic policy detail is determined, its practitioners must be appropriately funded.
I want to stress that word, “appropriately”. Because one of the dismaying factors in the setting of research and other high-end educational priorities is that the funding of science — more accurately, the funding of technological applications of science — is seen to stand in zero-sum relationship to the funding of the humanities. This, to my mind, is tragically misconceived — and in the University of Tasmania the current emphasis being placed upon STEM can be seen as emblematic of this.
The humanities face systematic impoverishment throughout the Englishspeaking world. As governments reconfigure the very purpose for which universities exist, away from a concept of liberal education in which the “product” was to be the forging of human autonomy and the development of skills of citizenship (social competence, and a capacity for selfdirection and critical analysis), to the narrowly focused technically complex skills demanded by industry, the big loser is the humanities.
Subjects once considered core curriculum — philosophy and history, say — face increasing threats to their viability, and in many cases they have succumbed to these pressures. The bottom line is the bottom line.
Unless a subject is seen to contribute directly to the research and development agenda of big capital, its place in the academy is not secure. To put it bluntly, we are witnessing a change in which education is replaced by training.
The new university is not my university — and it should not be yours. The reconfiguration of the very purpose of the university is occurring — has occurred — with an almost complete absence of resistance. Everyone seems to approve. It is not only industry that wants universities set up to meet narrowly technical imperatives — parents and students also seem to regard as “a waste of time” any component of the curriculum that does not contribute directly to specialised employability within a hypercomplex world.
This is sheer folly — a position that is often asserted but never backed by evidence. In fact, in the employment market that currently exists, one in which skills are rendered redundant on an almost daily basis, the versatility provided by a broad-based education has significant advantages over the inflexibility of technical training.
Industry, too, needs in its workforce people with the adaptive capacity and the liberated imaginations that a humanities education can supply. Yet, despite this, the humanities face systematic impoverishment throughout the English-speaking world.
The impoverishment of the humanities has grave consequences for the viability of a dynamic sphere of public discourse, and of the structures of civil society and democratic process itself. No democratic polity can survive without an energised, capable and activist citizenry, one with a confidence in its capacity for critique. Negative feedback is the very lifeblood of democratic politics, and political actors must expect and welcome criticism. When such criticism is deemed disloyal; and when it becomes dangerous to speak out, democracy is under extreme threat.
A capacity for social critique crucially depends upon a flourishing humanities sector within the education system, because skills in critical reflection are what the humanities, almost uniquely, set out to inculcate.
Only a robust humanities can provide that vital capacity for negative feedback that enables societies to respond appropriately to crisis.
In my view, then, the humanities need to be activist, dissident and engaged with real-world events and processes. Its practitioners need to take the offensive; to get in the face of the enemies of civil society in the larger world and of the humanities within the narrower context of formal education. As global processes renounce the ideal of democratically empowered citizenship in favour of the uncritical stimulus-response that characterises the consumer (the model of human behaviour favoured by both government and capital), the capacities of critical rationality and creative imagining become ever more imperative. Only the humanities can deliver these, and we should loudly and assertively say so.
The crisis of our times is that those who inhabit political, economic and bureaucratic structures are increasingly averse to this view. It is for this reason that
To put it bluntly, we are witnessing a change in which education is replaced by training.
teachers and scholars within the humanities should become assertive; should forcefully insist upon the crucial social role that the humanities play, and demand that they be returned to the centre of formal systems of education.
This will require a change in educational funding priorities. Current funding systems massively favour technocratic knowledge over critical social capacity.
We should defend and fund the sciences, yes, but funding for the humanities should be appropriately commensurate to the funding of the sciences and the more technical components of the curriculum.
The dangers posed by the current funding and status imbalance can scarcely be exaggerated. Unless our critical capacity develops in step with our technocratic capacity the risk is that we will retain only the formal husk of democracy, within a power structure that will effectively be technocratic and, in its consequences, totalitarian.