Irreducible Education

Much critical ado is being made in educational circles about the value and utility of the humanities.

As a student of the humanities, I therefore find it distressing that so many attempts to rebut such criticisms proceed forth from the same faulty principle that is spurring the opposition.

In defending the humanities, why do we so often resort to utilitarian arguments, when utility is the educational principle that is crowding the humanities out of curricula across the country?

Rather than arguing that humanities majors are actually (unbeknownst to their critics) better contributors to society or better equipped to navigate the exigencies of confused contemporary life, we should ground our responses in the reality that knowledge and the pursuit and attainment of truth are not merely contingent goods, worthwhile only insofar as knowledge and truth can be wielded as power; insofar as knowledge and truth are merely instrumental.

Knowledge is instrumental, and encountering the robust panorama of the human narrative as one does in studying the humanities can afford a perspective on human nature that will in turn better equip one to live well in modernity.

But knowledge is much more than this: It’s an irreducible human good, a good that merits our commitment simply by merit of its perfective quality; it is a reality that completes (makes perfect) human nature.

To construct syllabi and curricula according to the principle of instrumental utility is just as wrong as to respond to those efforts with an appeal to the instrumentality and utility of the knowledge and perspective one encounters through the humanities.