I Teach the Humanities, and I Still Don’t Know What Their Value Is

If a group of math students fails to learn the material, that might be because the teacher is not trying hard enough or because she has been inappropriately tasked with, for example, teaching calculus to toddlers. Supposing, however, that neither of these things is true — the teacher is passionately invested in teaching, and she has many suitable students — yet her students all fail the final exam, eventually we would be forced to say that she might not know math so well.

I believe that we humanists are in the position of this math teacher. We have been issuing a steady stream of defenses of the humanities for many decades now, but the crisis of the humanities only grows. In the face of declining student interest and mounting political scrutiny, universities and colleges are increasingly putting humanities departments on the chopping block.

We humanists keep on trying to teach people what the value of the humanities is, and people keep failing to learn our lessons. This suggests to me that humanists do not know the value of the thing they are trying to defend. We can spout pieties that sound inspiring to those already convinced of our cause, but so too can an ignorant math teacher “teach” math to those who already know it.

As a humanist — someone who reads, teaches and researches primarily philosophy but also, on the side, novels and poems and plays and movies — I am prepared to come out and admit that I do not know what the value of the humanities is. I do not know whether the study of the humanities promotes democracy or improves your moral character or enriches your leisure time or improves your critical thinking skills or increases your empathy.

You might be surprised to learn that this bit of ignorance poses no obstacle to me in the classroom. I suppose it would if I approached the teaching of Descartes as a matter of explaining why reading Descartes will make you a better person, but that is not how I teach Descartes, nor does any philosopher I know teach Descartes in that way. I am there to lay out the premises of his reasoning, to explain some of the relevant concepts, to entertain questions and objections and to work through the arguments together with the students to see if they hold water. We are searching, trying to find the value that may be there.

I once asked the best teacher I ever had why she no longer taught her favorite novel, and she said that she stopped teaching a book when she found she was no longer curious about it. The humanistic spirit is, fundamentally, an inquisitive one.

In contrast, defenses of the humanities are not — and cannot be — conducted in an inquisitive spirit, because a defensive spirit is inimical to an inquisitive one. Defensiveness is, it must be admitted, an understandable response when budgets are being cut and the chopping block is brought out and you need to explain why you shouldn’t be on it. It may be that humanists need to spend some of our time joining political battles, which, like all political battles, require their participants to pretend to know things that they do not actually know.

Nonetheless, we should be alert to the danger of becoming accustomed to putting our worst foot forward. An atmosphere of urgency and calls for immediate action are hostile to fields of study like literature and philosophy that require a contemplative mood, and the pretense of knowing what one doesn’t actually know is hostile to forms of inquiry that demand an open mind.

A defensive mind-set also encourages politicization. If the study of literature or philosophy helps to fight sexism and racism or to promote democracy and free speech — and everyone agrees that sexism and racism are bad and democracy and free speech are good — then you have your answer as to why we shouldn’t cut funding for the study of literature or philosophy. Politicization is a way of arming the humanities for its political battles, but it comes at an intellectual cost. Why are sexism and racism so bad? Why is democracy so good? Politicization silences these and other questions, whereas the function of the humanities is to raise them.

Defensiveness also threatens to infect our work as humanists. A posture that we initially assumed for the purposes of confronting skeptics comes to restructure how we talk to our students, how we construct our syllabuses and even how we read the texts we assign, which now must prove themselves useful toward whichever political goals currently receive the stamp of approval.

Humanists are not alone in their ignorance about the purpose of their disciplines. Mathematicians or economists or biologists might mutter something about practical applications of their work, but very few serious scholars confine their research to some narrow pragmatic agenda. The difference between the humanists and the scientists is simply that scientists are under a lot less pressure to explain why they exist, because the society at large believes itself to already have the answer to that question. If physics were constantly out to justify itself, it would become politicized, too, and physicists would also start spouting pious platitudes about how physics enriches your life.

I will admit that every time I hear of a classics department being cut, it hurts. I may not know why it is important to read Homer and Plato, but I do have a deep love for reading, teaching and pondering those texts. That love is what I have to share with others, as well as the surprise and delight of finding that people thousands of years dead can be one’s partners in inquiry.

If at some point I am called on to defend the study of Homer or Descartes at some official hearing, I will do my best, but I do not deem it right to change my approach to what I study and teach in anticipation of that encounter. I will not run to battle; the battle will have to come to me.

The task of humanists is to invite, to welcome, to entice, to excite, to engage. And when we let ourselves be ourselves, when we allow the humanistic spirit that animates us to flow out not only into our classrooms but also in our public-self presentation, we find we don’t need to defend or prove anything: We are irresistible.

Are the humanities valuable? What is their value? These are good questions, they are worth asking, and if humanists don’t ask them, no one will. But remember: No one can genuinely ask a question to which she thinks she already has the answer.

Agnes Callard (@AgnesCallard) is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and the author of “Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming.”

Letter Responses

To the Editor:

As a fellow humanist, I understand Dr. Callard’s desire to avoid conventional pieties and, in the spirit of ongoing inquiry, to claim not to know the value of humanities disciplines. But it is still dispiriting to read this essay with the fear that only humanities undergraduates — well schooled in the reading of subtle texts — will understand the irony in hers.

As one who taught in an English department for almost three decades and went on to be the head of a rare book library, I do know the value of the humanities. Right-thinking humanists do not claim to make their students better people or even try to do so. Such a claim smacks of egotism and hubris. But we do claim to make students better critical readers, thinkers and writers — people better equipped as a result of studying complex texts to judge competing claims, to weigh evidence and to make better-informed judgments on a host of issues.

We humanists are the keepers and interpreters of our civilization, defined globally, and we are charged by tradition and consensus to evaluate that civilization in our teaching and scholarship. This is, of course, itself a conventional piety — but like many conventional pieties, it is a true one.

Because we have done so in the face of growing indifference and shrinking support, it is simply not helpful to have an academic colleague proclaim, even ironically, that she does not know the value of the humanities.

Gail Kern Paster
Washington
The writer is director emerita of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

To the Editor:

The debate over the value of humanities courses is really a question of value for money — especially when college costs so much. But it’s worth remembering the skills that humanities courses give us.

First: curiosity. None of us know exactly where we are heading; we can shape the journey if we are curious about the unknown. Humanities courses teach us to be flexible and make us question our assumptions.

Second: the power of example. Works of art and literature link our current concerns to those of others. They show us the frightening power of a secret shared, of misplaced trust, of leadership forged by challenges. History is a lively tale of tough decisions, of choices and their consequences.

Third: communication. Google Translate may make language classes seem unnecessary. But learning another language gives you a deeper understanding of what others value. And the art of debate is a skill we all need.

When I went to university, I saw my humanities courses as a foundation. It turns out they were a staircase. I could find and change careers, thrive in my choice and lead in a crisis.

I use my “useless” knowledge all the time. An elected leader in Germany once asked me about globalization and its consequences in America. I found myself talking about the power of community, the role of local government and the consequences of job loss. I cited work by an American playwright to underscore my point. In German.

Turns out, those humanities courses were useful after all.

Robin Quinville
Arlington, Va.
The writer is a former diplomat.

To the Editor:

As an academic scientist, I eagerly read Agnes Callard’s thought-provoking essay. It is simply not true that “scientists are under a lot less pressure to explain why they exist.” While society understands that science in general is useful, individual researchers are under great pressure to justify the applicability of their work in order to obtain funding to support it.

Moreover, most academics, whether scientists or humanists, work at universities that center teaching rather than research. In teaching universities, the number of students who major, minor or take courses in a given discipline is the primary determinant of a discipline’s value. Since the majority of students do not major in a science discipline, most scientists will need to justify why they exist.

David Snyder
Queens
The writer is a chemistry professor at William Paterson University but is expressing his own views.

To the Editor:

In her guest essay, a humanities professor, Agnes Callard, conceded, “I do not know what the value of the humanities is.”

As a psychologist, I rely daily on the many lessons of my various humanities classes. A psychologist’s only tool to help people remediate their symptoms, reform their lives and stave off suicide is words. My education in the humanities has helped me, more than anything else, to pick the right words to treat my patients’ “dis-ease” as effectively as possible.

The bane of existence for most educators is that they rarely get to harvest the fruits of their labor, and in this way Dr. Callard’s despondence is understandable. However, I hope she and others who teach the humanities can take solace in knowing their efforts contribute, albeit indirectly, to the healing of many — one word at a time.

John G. Cottone
Stony Brook, N.Y.

To the Editor:

I was a high school history teacher for more than 30 years, I taught what used to be called Western Civ, as well as U.S. history, women’s history, African American Voices and geography. The whole gamut. Yes, I loved what I taught. But sharing that love was not my motivation.

My students have become engineers, doctors, moms, software creators and leaders of nonprofits of various sorts. They may well have forgotten that they have read Mary Wollstonecraft, Frederick Douglass or Nietzsche. But they still retained the habits of critical reading, clear writing, thorough research and thoughtful deliberation. Many of them found solace and inspiration in the historical figures they encountered. Some found vocations in the movements they studied.

Like Agnes Callard, I have no need to defend the humanities one author or one discipline at a time. But when schools stop teaching humanities courses, students lose more than just education in social values and cultural literacy. They lose valuable life skills that sustain them regardless of their future paths.

Liz Zucker
Cambridge, Mass.