A Letter from the Executive Director
If life is short, why waste your time wondering if Elizabeth Bennet will marry Mr. Darcy? You could be spending your time in school far more profitably by learning something useful instead of reading Jane Austen.
That seemed to be the message from the director of a local technology center quoted recently in the Maine Sunday Telegram: “In today’s world,” he said, “high school students must speak and communicate effectively, not be able to dissect the plot and characters of a great novel.” He complained of a “terrible mismatch” between traditional humanities courses and “the skills students need to be thinkers, inventors and innovators.” If schools continued as they were, he warned, we would not be competitive in the global economy.
The speaker had every good intention, but he falls into a trap that goes back at least as far as the ancient Greeks: the urge to privilege know-how over understanding. On the contrary, we learn how to be citizens by studying history, and we may learn some valuable lessons about how to live our lives by studying—and discussing—imaginative literature. (Jane Austen may be of some assistance there.) Of course there are different types of intelligence and different styles of processing information. And obviously “old” subjects can be taught in interesting new ways. But to dismiss the humanities tradition in favor of “practical” education raises troubling issues. It suggests that art, literature, music, drama, history are the playground of a leisured few. Two hundred years ago, that was largely true. But the American ideal—however inadequately we’ve been able to realize it—is based on the radical notion that all young Americans deserve an education of the highest possible quality.
As a printmaker, I certainly value “hands on” learning. I’ve spent hours exploring the complicated, time-consuming techniques of getting ink onto paper—with the help of brush and burin, knife and printing press. Yet for all the technological skills that artists acquire, there would be something lacking in their work if it were created in a historical vacuum. We need to learn the many ways in which other artists, past and present, have used their medium to express their concerns and responses to the world around them. Is this know-how or understanding? I think it’s some fruitful combination of the two.
As for competing in the global economy, I’d like to suggest that you speak to teachers who have taken the Council’s annual Views of the East professional development seminar. This intense, 30-hour program, undertaken in partnership with the World Affairs Council of Maine, focuses on China, Japan, and Korea, including their economic and technological development. But it also introduces the history, religions, arts and crafts, and Confucian world view of these countries—and it suggests that some knowledge of all these inter-related things is the beginning of wisdom when it comes to understanding East Asia. Why don’t we apply the same lessons closer to home?
Dorothy Schwartz
Executive Director
