Humanities in the United States

Humanities in the United States refers to the study of humanities disciplines, such as literature, history, language, performing and visual arts or philosophy, in the United States of America.

Many American colleges and universities seek to provide a broad "liberal arts education", in which all college students to study the humanities in addition to their specific area of study. Prominent proponents of liberal arts in the United States have included Mortimer J. Adler[1] and E.D. Hirsch. A liberal arts focus is often coupled with curricular requirements; colleges including Saint Anselm College and Providence College have mandatory two-year core curricula in the humanities for their students.

The 1980 United States Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities described the humanities in its report, The Humanities in American Life:

Through the humanities we reflect on the fundamental question: What does it mean to be human? The humanities offer clues but never a complete answer. They reveal how people have tried to make moral, spiritual, and intellectual sense of a world in which irrationality, despair, loneliness, and death are as conspicuous as birth, friendship, hope, and reason.

Conceptual validity

The very concept of the ‘humanities’ as a class or kind, distinct from the ’sciences’, has come under repeated attack in the twentieth century. T.S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions[2] argued that the forces driving scientific progress often have less to do with objective inference from unbiased observation than with much more value-laden sociological and cultural factors. More recently, Richard Rorty has argued that the distinction between the sciences and the humanities is harmful to both pursuits, placing the former on an undeserved pedestal and condemning the latter to irrationality. Rorty’s position requires a wholesale rejection of such traditional philosophical distinctions as those between appearance and reality, subjective and objective, replacing them with what he endorses as a new ‘fuzziness’. This leads to a kind of pragmatism where "the oppositions between the humanities, the arts, and the sciences, might gradually fade away... In this situation, ‘the humanities’ would no longer think of themselves as such...."[3]

Modernism and postmodernism

In the United States, the late 20th century saw a challenge to the "elitism" of the humanities, which Edward Said has characterized as a "conservative philosophy of gentlemanly refinement, or sensibility." Such postmodernists argued that the humanities should go beyond the study of "dead white males" to include work by women and people of color, and without religious bias. The French philosopher Michel Foucault has been a very influential part of this movement, stating in The Order of Things that "we can study only individuals, not human nature." However some in the humanities believed that such changes could be detrimental; the result is said to be what E. D. Hirsch Jr. refers to as declining cultural literacy.[4]

National institutions

President Lyndon Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act in 1965,[5] creating the National Council on the Humanities, and funded the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in 1969. NEH is an independent grant-making agency of the United States government dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities (see Public humanities).

NEH facilitated the creation of State Humanities Councils[6] in the 56 U.S. states and territories. Each council operates independently, defining the "humanities" in relationship to the disciplines, subjects, and values valued in the regions they serve. Councils give grant funds to individuals, scholars, and nonprofit organizations dedicated to the humanities in their region. Councils also offer diverse programs and services that respond to the needs of their communities and according to their own definitions of the humanities.

Career prospects

Criticism of the traditional humanities/liberal arts degree program has been leveled by critics who see them as both expensive and relatively "useless" in the modern American job market, where several years of specialized study is required in most job fields. In 2003, around 53% of the population had some college education with 27.2% having graduated with a Bachelor's degree or higher, including 8% who graduated with a graduate degree.[7] This has raised questions about the continuing value of humanities degrees in the United States. However, a 2014 review of American Community Survey data found that humanities majors earned an average of $15,000 more than workers without a bachelor's degree, although $5,000 less than the overall average for bachelor's degree holders.[8]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Adler, Mortimer J.; "A Guidebook to Learning: For the Lifelong Pursuit of Wisdom"
  2. ↑ Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The University of Chicago Press, 1962
  3. ↑ Rorty, Richard, Science as Solidarity, in Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers Volume I, Cambridge University Press, 1991
  4. ↑ Kernan, Alvin, editor; What's Happened to the Humanities?, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1997
  5. ↑ www.neh.gov
  6. ↑ www.neh.gov
  7. ↑ "US Census Bureau, educational attainment in 2003" (PDF). Retrieved 2007-01-03.
  8. ↑ Mulhere, Kaitlin (2014-10-17). "Jobs for Humanities, Arts Grads". Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved 2015-01-24.

External links

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