Jim Hightower:The humanities are priceless
Learning about medicine through classical art.
Via OtherWords.org
The far-out right-wing’s latest political ploy takes extremism to the extreme. Escalating their divisive series of “culture wars” — banning books, suppressing women’s rights, whitewashing history, demonizing teachers, etc. — their next idea is to declare war on ideas themselves.
Specifically, they’re going after state university programs that teach creative arts and social studies, including history, languages, music, civics, literature, economics, theology, and other courses in the humanities that explore ideas, foster free-thinking and expand enlightenment.
We can’t have that, can we?
Thus, GOP lawmakers in North Carolina, for example, are eliminating funding for top humanities professors in their universities, shifting those funds to programs in high-tech and engineering that are favored by the corporate hierarchy. Likewise, public universities in Alaska, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio and elsewhere are being made to cancel their humanities programs and puff up their departments of business, finance, and marketing
The right wing’s shriveled view is that a university education isn’t about expanding one’s horizon and enriching America’s democratic society — but solely about training students to fit into a corporate workforce, sacrificing the possibility of a fuller life for the possibility of a fatter paycheck. As a Mississippi Republican official explained, under this minimalized and monetized concept of higher education, state spending on college degree programs will require that they match the needs of the economy.
What? Is America nothing but its economy? Is the value of students measured only by the size of their future paychecks? Is public spending only worthy if it serves corporate interests?
Ironically, the politicians trying to cancel teaching of the humanities are proving that such courses are essential. After all, the humanities strive to humanize today’s social order of corporate domination, exploitation, and inequality. The value of that vastly exceeds its price.
In fact, the humanities are priceless.
Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer and public speaker.
The Robert Frost Memorial Library, at Amherst (Mass.) College. President John F. Kennedy, who revered the famed poet, gave his last major address, on Oct. 26, 1963, at the groundbreaking of the library building.
—Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel
At the Boston Museum of Fine Arts
— Photo by Omar David Sandoval Sida
After it hits us
“Planet III version 1)” (mixed media on paper with soil from San Pedro de Atacama River and charcoal from the community of Coyo), by Ponnapa Prakkamakul, in a show opening April 6 at the Augusta Savage Gallery, Amherst, Mass., pandemic permitting. In this show the painter and landscape architect explores sites and environments as an immigrant.
The rather ugly but well-stocked Robert Frost Library at Amherst College. The great poet (1874-1963) taught at the elite college off and on for 40 years. Sometimes he was just present and available to talk.