Vital Humanities. Their educational Potential

Abstract

In Classical Greece, conversation was considered the supreme form of human expression, in that it was the most human way that a person uses his/her body. Learning to speak properly—as H.I. Marrou asserts— meant thinking and living properly. Eloquence was what differentiated civilized human beings from barbarians.1 It is from these beginnings that the importance and meaning of the Humanities were understood in the most generic sense of the word. The aim of this paper is to reexamine the Humanities insofar as they have a genuine educational dimension. The first part contemplates the Humanities from a classical perspective and its situation in present day knowledge-based society. The second part examines what happened to the Humanities in the nineteenth-century Western world, and compares that to what happened later. In the third part, some lines of argument are presented, which show how vital the Humanities are to education. This paper concludes that the Humanities are necessary to modern-day goals, both in the educational and social contexts.