The Humanities

What is school for?

This is a paid post, but a version is available for free at this link, courtesy of the Center for Educator Wellness and Learning.

I’m going to use the term “humanities” pretty broadly here to encompass a lot of different fields of study and practice, including the arts, although for funding purposes the federal definition of the “humanities” keeps these separate. As the executive director for a federally-funded council on the humanities once explained to me, this has a lot to do with the way these domains were framed by one of the early Congressional supporters of federal funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities. To me, while there is a practical reason to separate them for funding, there is something false about describing philosophy and art, or English and theatre, or history and music, as if they are so foreign to one another that they need to occupy different boxes.

Still from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), public domain in the United States. “Epigram: The mediator between brain and hands must be the heart!”

Frederick Winslow Taylor is considered the godfather of “scientific management,” a belief system centered on the idea that by using data about the behavior of workers, managers can develop more efficient ways for workers to complete tasks. Taylor evidently believed that such a system would benefit not only the management class, but laborers, as well. He had trouble understanding that efficiency at the expense of individualism and autonomy can be a curse.

Modern American education owes a great deal to Taylorism. In its focus on outputs, on “science” and “data,” American education tries to improve itself by asking questions about whether it is generating outcomes that make it worth the investment.

But what are those outcomes supposed to be?