From mcmahon@mail.lemoyne.edu Sun Feb 2 05:32:05 2003 Received: from mxu2.u.washington.edu (mxu2.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.7]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.12) with ESMTP id h12DW4CK068040 for ; Sun, 2 Feb 2003 05:32:04 -0800 Received: from KIWI.LEMOYNE.EDU (kiwi.lemoyne.edu [192.231.122.6]) by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.12) with ESMTP id h12DW2QY031574 for ; Sun, 2 Feb 2003 05:32:03 -0800 Received: from mail.lemoyne.edu ([192.168.250.132]) by KIWI.LEMOYNE.EDU; Sun, 02 Feb 2003 08:31:47 -0500 Message-ID: <3E3D1DA0.348C2BFE@mail.lemoyne.edu> Date: Sun, 02 Feb 2003 08:31:13 -0500 From: "John M. McMahon" Reply-To: mcmahon@mail.lemoyne.edu X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.76 (Macintosh; U; PPC) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: classics@u.washington.edu Subject: Re: On Pinker in NY Times References: <5.1.1.5.2.20030131161742.026d7e20@mail.ucla.edu> <5.1.1.5.2.20030131161742.026d7e20@mail.ucla.edu> <5.0.0.25.2.20030201100155.017614b0@mail.attbi.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Alison Barker wrote: > What good is a study of "economics, evolutionary biology and statistics" > without a study of "Humanities," I wonder. Don't we need to know how we > created a world where such subjects appear to have so much value to > some? Don't we need to understand language in depth in order to be able to > study these subjects meaningfully? I don't think you'd find anyone on this list who would disagree with the importance of the humanities as AB has outlined above. However, having made -- and still (unsuccessfully so far) making -- the argument for instruction based on the tradition of the humanities (along with the other arguments, I'd add), I must say that it is my sense that the humanities argument (at least as we conceive it) is becoming less and less compelling at the levels where the real decisions are being made about the direction of higher education and what it is institutions need to (want to?) offer. I'll spare list members the account of the most recent developments that have affected my program, Latin in particular; but the more I look at it, the more correspondences I see to the link in the natural world between the survival of individual species and the larger role that habitat preservation/destruction has in the ultimate fate of a species. Right now, there seems to be a shift (for whatever reason -- though I can make a few guesses) toward a paradigm that roughly approximates the so-called "working forest" model now in vogue at the national level. I fear that in the application of such a model to what we do in education we lose both the concept of an integrated, self-sufficient and interdependent system as well as the wider support for individual areas of study, however rare, delicate or threatened. (In of itself, of course, an intact forest ecosystem *is* a "working forest," affording numerous benefits not only to its own continuing natural integrity but also to the human community ... including but not limited to those benefits measurable by any number of economic means: water quality, cooling properties, carbon oxygen exchange, etc. The same may be said for wetlands, prairies, and so on.) Similarly, like the recently resurrected "wetlands mitigation" program (that naturally occuring wetlands can be filled in and developed if twice as much an area of "created" wetlands is established elsewhere) language instruction beyond the simple service level often suffers a decline when the emphasis is placed on in-translation courses, frequently so when actual requirements are waived or when the emphasis on enrollment numbers cause the teaching ofr advanced language courses to become a risky endeavor. The way to preserve an endangered species is to preserve the ecosystem that supports it; I've suggested as much to a variety of audiences over the years both in and out of my professional field. But that's what is so troubling about the present discussion as I see it, for I am slowly recognizing that arguments based on what *we* see as the role of what we do wrt the humanities are becoming less and less convincing in the new approach to the purpose of education. John McMahon LMC .