I have to admit to a tendency for my eyes to glaze over when people talk about a crisis in the humanities. I’ve been hearing about their imminent collapse my entire professional life. I was already being told forty-five years ago, when I was a graduate student in history at Columbia, that I was joining a dying profession.
Later, when I studied the history of the humanities, I discovered that the impending doom of the humanities was a topos that went back at least seven centuries. The Italian poet Petrarch, who effectively founded the studia humanitatis in the fourteenth century by adding poetry, history, and moral philosophy to the seven liberal arts, was himself a champion cultural pessimist. The Italians of his time, he thought, were hopeless barbarians, uniquely resistant to the voices of ancient virtue found in old books. His educated contemporaries couldn’t even speak decent Latin:
May Almighty God damn them, living or dead, for whom it was not enough to have lost through their own cowardice the virtues and glory of their ancestors [the ancient Romans], or all the arts of war and peace, unless in their folly they should also dishonor their ancestral speech and character.
Leon Battista Alberti, the original Renaissance man, complained bitterly that despite studying literature with such intensity that he had suffered a mental breakdown, he could find no patron to reward his efforts. Isaac Casaubon, the great classical scholar whose career waxed during the high tide of Renaissance classical learning, gloomily predicted that knowledge of Latin would soon die out in Europe after he was gone. No one cared about literature anymore.
The humanities, as it turns out, are pretty hard to kill—though the twentieth century made a good fist of it. Educational modernizers in England during the First World War, around the time of the Battle of the Somme, argued that classical education was responsible for Britain’s inability to beat the Germans. If only as much time was devoted to science education as to Homer and Virgil, the British might be able to build decent artillery and effective airships. A brilliant response to the argument was written in 1915 by R. W. Livingstone. It is still one of the best defenses of classical education.
After the Second World War, C. P. Snow argued in The Two Cultures that science education was superior to literature. How could Britain compete in a global economy with the United States and other nations, he asked, if it did not have a forward-looking educational system that trained the young to participate in a world of advanced technology? Snow by this point was a certified member of the great and the good, so his attack on literary education became a cause célèbre. This time the humanities’ champion was the literary critic F. R. Leavis, whose monstrous personal attack on Snow was no advertisement for the humanizing effects of the humanities.
During the 1960s, however, the powers of darkness hit upon a new strategy to limit the influence of the humanities: They dehumanized them. This strategy was far more successful at reducing the humanities’ market share. The French lords of theory set about making great works of literature unreadable, covering them in a carapace of pseudo-scientific jargon and poisoning literary pleasure with Marxist guilt. Since Horace, the humanities had made lovers of poetry by mixing the useful with the sweet, but thanks to the theory-mongers they lost that advantage. History was taken over by social science, and the most popular kinds of history (to judge by bookstore shelves), political biography and military history, were made outcasts in university history departments, both genres being considered naive and morally suspect. The capture of philosophy by logicians was every bit as successful at killing interest in the subject as it had been in the fourteenth century, the last time logic ruled the discipline. All of these trends were ceaselessly promoted, needless to say, as the wave of the future, and those academics who failed to follow the trends faced unemployment or denials of grants and promotions.
The results were predictable. Enrollments in the humanities dropped year after year. Humanities professors, bewildered, asked why students no longer wanted to take their courses, looking everywhere for an explanation except in the mirror.
For the few humanists in universities who (having tenure) defied these trends, the descent into Avernus seemed all too easy and return to the sunlit lands unimaginably laborious. That certainly was my own state of mind up to about five years ago. But the humanities, it turns out, do not need the academic-industrial complex, with its multibillion-dollar endowments, to succeed. There is in fact a strong argument to be made that large endowments, with all the deference to living donors they entail, not to mention all the compromises and bureaucracy of Big Education, can get in the way of the fundamental nexus of teacher, student, and books. People who want to learn just need a knowledgeable teacher to orient them to the books they want to read and help stir their enthusiasm. They want the framework of a course to help impose some discipline on themselves, and they want congenial companions with the same interests who like to talk about literature and philosophy. Teachers just want students who love books and want to talk about them, and enough income to supply themselves with tea and cakes. You can have effective education, it turns out, with very little fuss and expense.
The growing classical education movement is proof. Readers of this journal will know how, since the crises of 2020–21, classical education in grades K-12 has been growing by leaps and bounds as an alternative to the sclerosis affecting Big Education, especially union-dominated public schools. There are now more than a million American children and young adults being educated using the same traditional methods and texts that have been discarded by district public schools and elite private schools. The latter have moved from one fad to the next, and their mission statements now talk less about humanizing students and more about indoctrinating them in luxury beliefs.
Memoria College, which offers an online M.A. in Great Books, is a newish addition to the movement and the tree of institutions that has branched out from Memoria Press (founded in 2002). It is the first institution, to my knowledge, to run a program specifically for “Nicene” Christians, meaning Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christians. I was recently invited by the college to speak at the annual conference for classical educators in Louisville, Kentucky. There, I met some of Memoria College’s teachers and recent graduates, a varied and impressive group. After listening to Memoria graduates speak for two days, I began to wish that I had such dedicated readers and such thoughtful and well-spoken students at Harvard. I met an Orthodox monk and a Protestant minister—but it was the homeschool moms, educated women who wanted to return to the life of the mind, that impressed me the most.
Adult classical education for Christians is just starting out, but it’s certainly among the most hopeful developments in educational reform of the last few years, another example of how classical education is rehumanizing the humanities. As Martin Cothran, one of the founders of Memoria Press and a long-time public advocate for classical education in Kentucky, told me—“homeschooling mothers will change the world.”
James Hankins is a professor of history at Harvard University.
First Things depends on its subscribers and supporters. Join the conversation and make a contribution today.
Click here to make a donation.
Click here to subscribe to First Things.
Image by Simone Cantarini, provided by Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain. Image cropped.
