#Debate: The Steady Decline of Humanities Education May Be One of the Most Shortsighted Things Human Society Has Done

A utilitarian view of education—and of social progress generally—is certainly one big cause, but the decay of humanities education itself matters just as much.

Whenever people compare the higher-education systems of China and the United States, one difference comes up again and again: in the U.S., the humanities form a more complete system, one thoroughly woven into the undergraduate curriculum. This model usually goes by the name general education, or liberal arts education.

General education asks students not to rush into declaring a major in their first two years, but to sample as many different subjects as they can across a range of courses, broadening what they know while they search for what interests them. Its humanities courses, meanwhile, draw more heavily on canonical texts and the Western cultural tradition, which makes them better at building students' capacity for critical thinking and their sense of civic awareness.

But literature, history and philosophy—core parts of general education—now face a crisis. Take history: Hal Brands and Francis Gavin, two historians at Johns Hopkins University, argue that the discipline is committing slow-motion suicide. "In recent decades, professional historians have grown ever more distant from students and the public, and have gradually stopped engaging with the crucial matters of contemporary politics, diplomacy, war and peace." "The historical profession is shirking its responsibilities, no longer engaging with the outside world or grappling with some of the fundamental problems facing America today."

That tendency, they believe, has pushed students away from history. Since 2008, the number of students choosing history as a major has fallen by more than 30%. And according to U.S. Department of Education figures, between 2007 and 2016 the number of undergraduate degrees awarded in literature, history and philosophy, the three traditional pillars of humanities education, fell by 22%, 25% and 15% respectively, while over the same period the number of students choosing business, engineering and computer science rose by 24%, 705% and 85%.

Universities, meanwhile, have been cutting what they spend on general education. In January 2019, a campus of the University of Wisconsin announced it would cut several disciplines tied to general education, among them history, German and French, to cope with a widening budget deficit and a shrinking student body. The school said that given the grim job market, universities ought to give students more education that would help their future careers.

Research by the economist David Breneman argues that the number of liberal arts colleges devoted to general education will gradually fall from roughly 200 around 1990 to 120. From disciplines to students to institutions, general education is going through a hard stretch.

"Is a university without a history major still a university?" A New York Times report on that University of Wisconsin campus quoted a student confronting the administration with the question. It speaks for a large share of the people who see the decline of general education as a crisis. Another New York Times editorial, after criticizing the practices described above, argued that higher education has become too job-oriented, and that general education's standing inside universities has collapsed as a result.

In the East as in the West, treating education as a tool for landing a good job is common. People believe education can change their fate and open a channel for moving up between social classes.

Yet plenty of scholars have found that pinning hopes of climbing the social ladder on a diploma is nothing more than a myth. The American sociologist Randall Collins published a book called The Credential Society, arguing that education has not made society more equal and that social class has changed little because of it—a parent's class, rather, is the main thing that decides how much education a person gets.

The myth persists all the same, and it keeps shaping what students choose, above all what they major in. As technical staff have grown more valuable, students in the related majors find it easier to land high-paying work after graduation; over the past few decades, finance and programming have been the prime examples.

The anthropologist Karen Ho once worked on Wall Street. "Earning $100,000 a year at 24 was the standard in the front office of Wall Street in the 1990s. For MBAs, who generally had Wall Street experience, incomes of $200,000 to $300,000 from the second year on the job were typical, before they had even turned 30." In her book Liquidated, she describes Wall Street this way: "Such pay produced the effect of an advertisement for getting rich overnight, to the point that most people on Wall Street held tight to a job and a way of life they often did not enjoy."

The same lines could describe a programmer's life. Even though most internet companies demand punishing hours, students still teach themselves however they can, or sign up for computer science courses, so that one day they too can get into an internet company. Much of the pull is the industry's myth of the million-yuan salary.

Meanwhile, tuition keeps climbing. In 2017, average tuition at U.S. private universities was $35,720, and $10,270 at public ones. Over the past decade, the cost of a college education and other school-related expenses has risen 63%.

Tuition has risen far faster than inflation over the same period, which forces students to pay for college with loans. Data shows that nearly a quarter of American adults carry student debt, that the total stands at more than $1.5 trillion, and that the average borrower owes $29,650. Under that pressure, students enrolling today naturally lean toward subjects that lead easily to jobs rather than toward the humanities.

The pull grows stronger as higher education reaches further down the social ladder. According to U.S. Department of Education figures, the share of American high school graduates going on to college rose from 45.1% in 1960 to 65.6% in 1998. And because the overall U.S. population kept growing, the rise in absolute enrollment was sharper still: from 2000 to 2016, the total number of students in four-year and two-year degree programs rose from 13.2 million to 16.9 million, and is projected to reach 17.4 million by 2027.

"Until the end of the Second World War, a college education was still largely reserved for the children of the rich and the well-born. But in the prosperous two decades that followed came a huge increase in the number of universities and in enrollment (the country now has more than 1,400 four-year colleges and universities), along with a widespread yearning for what a college degree could bring." So wrote Benedict Anderson, the scholar known for his work on nationalism, in his memoir A Life Beyond Boundaries.

As higher education has come within easy reach, what it means to students has changed. Where people once saw it as a way to acquire knowledge, they now find it easier to see it as an investment—a diploma that buys higher pay later. The result is that professional programs such as finance, engineering, law and medicine pull harder, while literature, history and philosophy shrink.

But it would be more accurate to say the humanities are declining not because people treat education as a tool, but because the humanities can no longer meet what today's society counts as "useful."

Higher education has, in fact, always served a vocational purpose. Anderson took pride in the general education he received, yet he also saw that "this kind of education was designed along fairly conservative lines, one could say to reproduce the traditional heirs of the upper middle class. Through such a general education, students could still hope in the end to become senior civil servants, members of an oligarchy, or respected old-school teachers."

Seen historically, "the university was originally made up of a few core disciplines—law, medicine, theology—all of them vocational by nature." The urban historian Lewis Mumford points out in The City in History that universities began much as guilds of blacksmiths or tanners did: both existed "to prepare the ground for people entering a particular occupation, and to lay down the rules that occupation's members should follow in common."

In that sense, behind the decline of the humanities sits a deeper question: what role do the humanities actually play in society today?

Scholars who set out to defend general education usually tie its value to civic awareness and democratic government. The American scholar Allan Bloom wrote in The Closing of the American Mind: "Every educational system has a moral goal it tries to attain, and this shapes its curriculum... A political regime needs citizens who match its fundamental principle. Aristocracy needs gentlemen, oligarchy needs men who venerate and chase money, and democracy needs people who love equality."

The link between general education and democracy rests largely on this understanding. Democracy is a process of negotiation: different stakeholders bring their own ideas and demands to the table and, through argument and discussion, find a solution all sides can live with. For that process to work, every side has to state its views clearly and rationally, and to listen to and acknowledge, with some empathy, the ideas and demands of those it is in conflict with.

The value of general education lies exactly in its power to form that kind of person. "It helps students put the question 'what is man' to themselves, and to see that the answer is neither obvious nor beyond finding; without attending to that question continually, there is no serious life to speak of."

Bloom placed the value of general education on a moral plane and held it to be something everyone should pursue. "The substance of humanistic learning is not so much answers as an eternal conversation... The essence of any Platonic dialogue is that it can be reenacted almost anywhere, at any time. He and his friends can think together."

Just as Bloom traced democracy and education back to Plato's day, this is a very classical idea. In ancient Greece, in the course of Socrates's dialogues with his students, they debated what makes a good life, what social justice means, how to pursue democracy. Using critical inquiry to find the direction human society ought to take was treated as a form of political expression, and many scholars have treated it as a legitimate way of organizing politics.

But as social structures have changed, this classical understanding of the relationship between politics and education has been fading. Whether it is the Athenian city-state or the founding of the United States, what they called democracy looks, in hindsight, more like a fairly elitist model of politics. In Athens, only adult men could take part. The small size of the city-state also meant everyone had a chance to speak. And the U.S. Constitution was, after all, what a few dozen men worked out in discussion.

Today, advanced information technology has expanded the population taking part in politics thousands of times over. "As the size of a nation grows, the political importance of each individual shrinks accordingly," argued the French political philosopher Benjamin Constant. Constant went on to distinguish how the ancients and the moderns live: the freedom of the ancients came from sharing political and social power with fellow citizens, while the freedom of the moderns comes from private pleasure, as both the appetite for public life and the channels into it disappear.

American politics has also grown more elitist, and young Americans less willing to take part in public life, so people have gradually drifted out of politics altogether. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, turnout in presidential elections fell from 67% in 1964 to 56% in 2016. In the 2016 election, turnout among 18-to-24-year-olds and 25-to-34-year-olds was only 39.4% and 46.4%, the lowest of any age group.

Politics today also looks nothing like politics in the classical period. Fine-grained management and control of society has replaced the weighing of good and evil as what politicians argue about. Governing goals are now set as a series of narrow, quantified indicators—GDP, fiscal revenue, unemployment, life expectancy. Which means that weighing the benefits and costs of different policies has become the core of politics.

If those policies are contested, and to some degree caught up in ideological disputes, what finally settles which path wins is still how the policy performs. The Labour Party's fall from power and the rise of neoliberalism over the past few decades happened precisely because people were unhappy with how they were living. The ideological quarrel between the two was not what the public cared about most.

The American sociologist Daniel Bell called this shift the move from an industrial society to a post-industrial one. One of its key features is that theoretical knowledge has become the core of how society is managed and changed. "Theoretical knowledge" here means quantitative knowledge—mathematical and statistical tools such as information theory, cybernetics, decision theory, game theory, utility theory and stochastic processes—applied to economics, society, politics and engineering.

By the 1970s, when Bell published The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, some signs of general education's decline had already appeared: the share of doctorates awarded in the social sciences and humanities fell from 50.3% in 1964 to 44.8% in 1977, with the natural sciences filling the gap.

The shift from classical society to post-industrial society weakened the tie between general education and politics, and the natural sciences, social sciences and engineering sciences replaced the humanities inside general education as the core forces driving how society runs. That change, in turn, keeps eroding general education's role in society through a number of different mechanisms.

Ultimately, the awkward spot general education occupies today seems to come down to this: it has lost its relevance to society and to students alike. Winning that relevance back will not be easy.

Brands and Gavin, the two history professors mentioned earlier, pose this question: history is by nature a discipline about how societies develop, and in the past many historians took an active part in debates over public policy—so why has history lost that standing and that function? Their answer, besides noting that today's historians increasingly write only for one another, also takes aim at what certain social movements have done to the profession in recent years.

"In 2015, only 44% of university history departments employed a professor of diplomatic history, against 85% four decades earlier. At Harvard, the fall 1966 semester offered a great many courses on the World Wars, the Cold War and the history of the British Empire, while in all of 2016 only one course touched on those subjects." What replaced those courses, the two professors argue, is history centered on race, gender, culture, society, and the groups ignored or oppressed in earlier historical narratives.

They are not denying the value of that research; they are saying that attention to those questions has squeezed out the space for traditional historical work. These shifts are, of course, bound up with how American society has developed since the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Well before history ran into trouble, in fact, Bloom had already examined what the civil rights movement did to general education. "The latest enemy of the strengthened canon is feminism... all literature to date has, on this view, discriminated against women... so feminism's attack aims straight at the content of these books... removing the most offensive authors—Rousseau, for instance—from the education of the young, or else exposing their distorted biases and treating the books merely as historical evidence of the distortion of women's nature and of injustice toward women."

Bloom, likewise, was not hostile to women; he was wary of ideology coming first, even at the cost of bending the facts. He recalled hearing that a group of Black radicals had once interrupted an economics teacher's class and accused him of racism, on the sole ground that he had judged Africa's economic performance by Western standards.

"People demanded that historians rewrite world history, and American history above all, to expose the nation as a conspiracy of domination and exploitation. Political scientists, too, were pressed to interpret the peoples of NATO countries as nationalists and to clear the Soviet Union's name of totalitarianism. In short, every fundamental view about domestic and foreign affairs demanded support from the social sciences—above all, that the sins of elitism, sexism and racism be purged from the social sciences."

Ideological threats can also come from government. Anderson notes: "More and more countries are working to tie research funding to their own policy agendas. (In America today, for instance, large sums are being poured steadily into 'terrorism studies' and 'Islamic studies,' and much of that money will be wasted on mediocre or unoriginal work.)"

Once the humanities are captured by ideology, or turned into a tool for endorsing it, the meaning of the humanities disappears with it. In the end, if the humanities merely repeat dogmatic rules of conduct, they differ little from a moral-education class—and that is not why a student would pay tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for a higher education.

As Bloom saw it, the root cause of change in the education system is what the wider social order demands. In an age that puts technology first, it is not hard to see why general education has declined, replaced by specialized, technical fields such as the natural sciences and engineering.

People who lament the decline of the humanities are not rare, and they list every reason the humanities are necessary in education. The American cultural historian Jacques Barzun once cautioned those who champion the humanities blindly: "[Defenders of the humanities] promise, in the vaguest language, a perfect balance of every virtue and potential, and this mechanical self-congratulation only brings more trouble."

The key question, he believed, is not whether the humanities still bear on contemporary society, but what a good education for all young people actually looks like.

The value of Barzun's question is this: before lamenting the decline of the humanities, we should really be asking something else. Is a post-industrial society that elevates the natural sciences, engineering and the social sciences a flawless society? If its shortcomings need making up for, what qualities does that take? And what kind of education should supply them?

In that sense, the decline of the humanities deserves attention because standing by and watching it happen means people have already accepted things as they are. And accepting a preset way of life without examining it is a mistake.

Cover image / The Bookshop; The School of Athens; a portrait of Nietzsche