what are humanities classes

what are humanities classes

Exploring the Significance and Relevance of Humanities Classes in Higher Education

1. Introduction to Humanities Classes

A sharp contrast often is drawn between the sciences (natural and social) on the one hand and the humanities, particularly the fine arts, on the other, with regard to general versus specialist education. The sciences generally are associated with knowledge and training that are specific to other disciplines and fields of endeavor. Insofar as there is a “threshold” body of information in the sciences, it is usually much larger and the attention span given to the basics is much shorter. On the one hand, liberal education traditionally has been contrasted with specialist or technician orientation. Furthermore, the two aims are often opposed: whereas the sciences provide general education in a mass society, especially to those students who are not attending the college or university for professional training, the humanities are often associated with “professional” curricula.

One area that always arises when discussing humanistic studies is about the institutions of higher education that cultivate the general education students. The interest of many universities and colleges in these studies must have relevance and significance of some sort, but what they are, and/or ought to be, and why some modify their offerings in the humanities, in terms of courses or programs, while others do not, are questions often difficult to answer. This paper raises some of these questions and then tries to answer them with special reference to students who are often called “nontraditional.”

2. Historical Background and Evolution of Humanities Education

For this reason, the etymology of the term has not been univocally determined, coming from the Latin “humanitas”. In the Roman age, it referred to the ensemble of alphabets and grammar taught to the young who had to learn to write and read properly. Parents who wanted to give an education to their children called this type of teachers by accosting them with the name of “magister umane litterarum” or “homo literatus”. Then, the liberal arts confirmed it as a human being teaching in as much as they could assimilate the cultural contents of a historical context, avoiding, however, the dirty work referring to the body. Only by the 15th and 16th centuries did the term “humanarum litterarum” give an abstract meaning similar to the present one, and thus education paths were created defined as humanistic curriculum. Only by the 18th century did a profound reaction arise to explore the human being in peculiar reference to the research conducted by the natural sciences. The rediscovery of the intellectual and moral wealth of the ancient world led to the reevaluation of the ancient Greek language, clearly separated from the Latin language, connected to the clergy tradition. The extensive use of Latin had actually increased the semantic gap with respect to the Roman reality, in this way widening it so much as to propose Latin as a language for the universal teaching of science and culture.

In ancient Western civilization, the humans from those days thought that humanities subjects had to do with everything that distinguished human beings from other forms of life, with special attention to culture, education, and mental skills. In reality, the term did not have the same semantic acceptance and origin as the current concept.

The concept of humanities dates from the Greco-Roman era of ancient Western civilization, and it was linked to the authority of the work of some male scholars whose main task was to interpret the forces of nature and the effect they may have on human life. Over the years, extraordinary discoveries and the development of unescapable techniques oriented human beings towards the relationship with the world and led them to the search for truth. Scientific curiosity, together with tolerance and dialogue, allowed researchers to contribute with their perspectives to help the understanding of the infinite number of extant and possible studies that explore the reality of a universe governed by physical laws that can be experimentally verified.

3. Key Disciplines and Topics Covered in Humanities Classes

In turn, when we talk about educational humanities content from the perspective of their realization in higher education in teaching particular academic subjects, it is reflected in the identification of key components of the humanities in content standards. Now it can be said that humanities core is a set of subjects and themes, established on the basis of their heuristic potential both for intellectual development of an individual, and for general professional competencies formation characteristic for any professional field, as well as for obtaining the necessary competencies and skills in specific professional field roads.

Though there is no universally accepted classification of the humanities, some of the disciplines commonly considered as part of the humanities and addressed in various theoretical works on the subject include the following key disciplines: History (general and particular), Philosophy (general and particular), History of religions (general and particular), Art history, Cultural studies, Logic, Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and Religious studies. Also, a number of interdisciplinary-based disciplines can be nominated: Linguistics, Communication studies, Anthropology, Literary studies. This list is not exhaustive and the humanities as academic classes cover a much larger amount of disciplines and topics.

4. The Role of Humanities in Fostering Critical Thinking and Cultural Understanding

The humanities help students to understand the moral, philosophical, religious, and aesthetic differences that keep cropping up between human beings. After all, coexistence is something that we actively encourage people to do at virtually every level of analysis, from its very simplest versions up to prospective space tourists. And that tolerance and understanding is something that students learn when they realize that it is perfectly acceptable for two perfectly honorable people to have, out of goodwill, the widest differences of opinion and the most varied of ultimate purposes. They recognize and learn to tolerate those of us who see the world in a different way. However, this is not the same thing at all as agreeing that any way of seeing the world is as valid as any other.

As contrasted with the often technical orientation of STEM courses and the potential career paths that these classes may open up for students, those in the humanities are better seen as fostering a critical consciousness. They help students to question, to critique, and to understand on a deeper level than the apparent surface truths that can be gained from the more “practical” classes. The humanities explore and question what it means to be human, and why humans have tended to organize their societies and their world-views in the ways that they have, while recognizing that there is never just one answer to these questions. It is in the very nature of the humanities that controversies about a particular question can go on indefinitely, since one of the possibilities is that the question is wrong or, in the words of T.S. Eliot, that every answer is like a question.

5. Challenges and Opportunities in Humanities Education

What these tracks add up to are partnerships with public and professional communities and a dynamic blend of curricula with pedagogies that often seem familiar but that now take very recognizable shapes. They are designed to balance the specific intellectual and cultural needs of our students with the publics that support our work and especially with the individuals who are not students but who are looking for work that reflects well on their own lives. Our students have struggled socially and academically in and out of the classroom during the pandemic, but so have the publics and the people and the communities where they learn about themselves and relate to widely held societal needs. Those parallel tracks matter a great deal, especially in programs and activities that are more visible, convincing, welcoming, and productive than the more narrow principles we might hide within the classroom.

Humanities education faces many specific challenges – declining enrollments in many subjects or disciplines, employing faculty not on a tenure line, the lofty, distant, but essential work by formal scholarly communities – but it is also inured especially to evolving employment markets, regional, state, and national educational needs and policies, and fragile student economies and cultures. Opportunities are not wild or hidden or emerging out of the wilderness, in case of steroids, in effect, but there are things that various publics and some states and universities are doing. These tracks are not invisible, but they are difficult to develop or change. Such opportunities matter greatly if universities are to capture students and if the programs are to remain intellectually, culturally, and socially relevant.