The paper grows out of personal reflections, arising from concerns about increasingly severe cuts across all educational sectors, affecting learning and teaching resources, courses and opportunities for people to study the humanities – such as languages, history, literature, art and music, philosophy, and Lord help us, theology and religion.
I understand the pressures in education coming from political, economic and financial choices. I recognise and with some regret, the move to thinking of education as a marketable commodity, the student as 'customer', and the primary focus being fixed on a student's employability after graduating, so that public money is seen to be 'value for money'. And as a consequence, I can see why Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM subjects) are seen as the high potential and high yield subject areas for creating a population with skillsets that enhance economic development and growth, market profitability, and global reach of product whether intellectual or material.
But somewhere along that trajectory of commodifying education and valuing it for its economic returns, there is a growing neglect of education as a humanising and transformative process, aiming at a person's growth towards the common good and the building and sustaining of community. Hence concern about the decimation of the Humanities across the University subject bases of Western culture.
My starting point is a quotation from Marilynne Robinson which you can find below. This then followed by further thoughts from Rudolf Bultmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the poet R. S. Thomas. Yes it will be a piece of special pleading; but I doubt I will apologise for that, or surrender the basic assertion that education is about more than marketability, employability and skill-sets, and must include preparation for life in community, growth in human development and understanding, maturing of ethical awareness and enabling towards independent thinking, moral imagination and cultural values, and all of these subject to the critical thinking of one who has learned to ask and live the creative questions.
“The universities now seem obsessed with marketing themselves and ensuring the marketability of their product, which will make the institution itself more marketable – a loop of mutual reinforcement of the kind that sets in when thinking becomes pathologically narrow.
The humanities teach us respect for what we are – we, in the largest sense. Or they should. Because there is another reality, greater than the markets, and that is the reality in which the planet is fragile, and peace among nations, where it exists, is also fragile.
The greatest tests ever made of human wisdom and decency may very well come to this generation or the next one. We must teach and learn broadly and seriously, dealing with one another with deep respect and in the best good faith.”
Marilynne Robinson, ‘Decline’, in The Givenness of Things (London: Virago, 2015) page 123.
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