During the mind-numbing and, at times, condescending, week of meetings affectionately called “Professional Development”, the district held an “Invocation” for all secondary teachers with a speaker named Will Wynn. The gist of the morning’s lecture was college-readiness, how educators need to be more aware and more responsible for expecting students to attend college. The discussion involved having the expectation that all students will attend college. I agree with the concept that every person should have a college education simply to teach them to think, embrace otherness, and open their minds to make them better human beings, however, not all people will and need to attend college directly from high school as a prerequisite for their careers.
My bigger concern had to do with the implications of his speech in terms of the humanities. He discussed the need for students to be more successful in math and science, and to go into math and science-related fields because that was where the future, and the money, is. In addition, teachers must follow career and college readiness standards; it is not enough to prepare our students to graduate and pass the TAKS tests, we need to prepare them for college. Again, I agree. All students should be prepared for college should they wish to attend at some point in their lives. God knows, my high school education didn’t prepare me—I was in for a rude awakening in my college classes, and had to re-learn how to learn and think.
Lastly, the week before school started we received the new TEKS and the new aligned curriculum. The new TEKS reflect the emphasis on workplace skills—more research, more nonfiction, more presentation skills, more persuasive skills. As such, the aligned curriculum reflects these changes. What does it mean for what we teach? Less literature.
Here is my concern: what is happening to the humanities? Is there a place for it in this future workplace? Many argue that humanities, creativity, left-brain thinking, communication and writing skills, and critical thinking skills are exactly what the future workplace needs. Employers can train people to think out of the box, think critically, and communicate effectively. Moreover, many argue that the humanities teach empathy and compassion, a necessary skill for a future that will be globally connected.
Last year, at Southwestern University, Ken and I attended Azar Nafisi’s lecture on exactly this topic: the need for humanities. She discussed the importance of art, literature, the humanities. She said, “That is the triumph of art. … Literature enables us to celebrate the courage of ordinary people who want to live with dignity. That is why a Primo Levi at death’s door in a Nazi concentration camp, or an Osip Mandel shtam at death’s door in a Soviet concentration camp, remembers Flaubert or Dante and goes to death bravely. At times when brutality is so hideous that people’s gold teeth are removed before they are sent to ovens, we all lose our faith—not just in our executioners, but in ourselves also. We lose hope in human beings when we see pictures from Abu Ghraib or when we hear about hostages being beheaded. We are all stained. The only way to retrieve our dignity or to retain our pride as human beings is to celebrate the highest achievement of humanity: individual dignity. Every great novel, from Stearns and Smollett and Fielding to Bellow and Roth and Morrison, celebrates individual human dignity. The individual is at the heart of all great literature”. Nafisi continues, “Every democracy was built by those who could imagine what did not exist, and that is especially true of this country…what Bellow meant was that, in the West, we are threatened with atrophy of feeling. A country that has lost its love for its poetry and for its soul is a country that faces death. That is what we face today in our culture of sleeping consciousness, where religion and American values are discussed through sound bites”. Nafisi emphasized the importance of literature as a means of freedom, imagination and creation and most importantly, a vehicle for feeling and emotion. She discusses literature as a place for us to awaken our consciousness, to awaken our feelings in the face of hopelessness, tragedy, and brutality. It makes us human.
This is why I have concerns when we start cutting literature out of the curriculum to make more room for writing resumes at the 10th grade level, creating persuasive brochures and creating multimedia presentations. Yes, these skills will be valuable in the workplace. Yes, we have to prepare our kids for college and the workplace. It would be a disservice not to. But what disservice are we doing our students when we cut literature, poetry, the arts and humanities from the curriculum? What kind of human beings are we sending out into the world when they haven’t had the literature to build empathy, compassion, and feeling? The loss of the humanities is the loss of the human-ness in all of us; it is critical to building the soul of our future.
