For today's version of an Education Moonshot, we need a different kind of "back to basics" movement. This one involves the critical need to resurrect civics and the humanities. In fact, you could argue that a major, underlying reason for the political chaos of 2016 - 2020 is a population that's been largely "dehumanized" by an education system that, since the late 1960s, has been steadily jettisoning the time-honored Liberal Arts (literature, history, philosophy, and the social sciences), for a narrow focus on education for jobs.
In the 1960s, when a utopian spirit of peace and love characterized the zeitgeist, one in five college students was a humanities major. Now that number has dwindled to a paltry one in twenty. Depressingly, the most popular field of study today is business.
But business education doesn't teach you how to be a better person. It doesn't give you empathy for others. Rather, business "study" (if that's what you want to call it), leads to a soulless, marketized consciousness that artificially elevates making money to the leading value in society. From Gordon Gekko to Donald Trump, we see how bad this selfish, "take the money and run" mentality is for society.
Diane Ravitch, perhaps America's leading education historian, said she remembers the day when "only the dumb kids studied business." Well I got news for you: the dumb kids have taken over. And they elected Donald Trump (himself a busines major) as their president. Trump, by the way, is only our second business major president. Guess who the first was? George W. Bush. How's that working for ya?
And is it simply a coincidence that, just as we've been turning our backs on the Humanities, so our public discourse has coarsened to its current level of barbarism?
People talk of the darkness of the current political climate. Well what do you expect, once you stop teaching the very disciplines that Matthew Arnold said give us "sweetness and light?" Subjects that nurture empathy and soul. And imagination, which, as Emily Dickinson said, "lights the slow fuse of the possible." Not to mention critical thinking.
When we learn to discuss great works of literature in a calm, rational manner, openly sharing our differences of opinion, learning from one another in dialogue, unafraid to change our minds when presented with new evidence, including in the form of stories others tell, the kind of democratic maturity this nurtures-which fosters a spirit of growth and transformation-creates ideal citizens for a democracy.
Humanistic studies also value nuance, complexity, and the kind of paradoxical thinking which has gone by the wayside in our polarized age of absolute certainty and rightness; leading to a politics of "my side is great and yours sucks." The humanities can lead us away from this divisive, "either-or" mindset, which has paralyzed civic discourse, back to a saner, dialogical "both-and" fusion of the best aspects of liberalism and conservatism.
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