Humanities - The Heart of Liberal Education Essay -- Education Philoso

I justify the humanities by sketching four views of knowledge in which the idea of an honorary society or an integration of disciplines major power be understood. I assume that every system of higher tuition inevitably appeals to concepts of knowledge. Such concepts cannot be isolated from political and civic dimensions of vitality as well as from personal cultivation and character. N nonpareiltheless, older views establish on these aspects are open to serious criticism. The four views considered are Aristotelian-Thomistic, Cartesian-positivist, Kantian, and conservative (in a unsubtle and hermeneutic sense). The paper describes key elements in apiece of these views and notes several objections, with a marked preference for Kantian and traditionalist views. Kant provides for refilling of the humanities, especially ethics and literature (the moral and aesthetic), within a mannikin in which modern scholarship displaces ancient teleological nature. Tradition is warrant on pra ctical grounds--by the need to appropriate for oneself the knowledge and experience of prehistoric generations (without which human life loses continuity and meaning). Further, the humanities save the great texts from absolution to which progress would otherwise consign them. The humanities counteract the tendency of science to undermine the conditions of its own possibility, as well as the discipline, knowledge, and virtue inevitable for its own origin. Two questions are urgently posed to the modern academy what is the justification for congregating all the disciplines of modern knowledge under one roof as if they belonged integrally togetherif, that is, there is one? For by chance it is merely a convenience. And secondly, what is the justificationif there is anyfor insisting upon th... ...ndered unnecessary by its existence. Technology makes perpetual adolescents of us, because of the ease with which it puts great power in our hands its power diminishes our desire (and thus our capacity) for responsibility. In the face of this detail of modern life, the traditionalist view of education seeks to reverse this effect, without denying the legitimacy of science. It cultivates liberal virtues by keeping the classics and all the great texts alive, including the classics of science itself (physical and human), abandoned by later science. Traditional stances like those of (1), (2), and (3), may be suspicious of it because it declines the try on to found education upon the dogma of a metaphysics or an epistemology. But it may well be the most practical way pedagogically that the aims and centre of those approaches can be sustained within a modern environment.