Up with the Humble Humanities

Thinking should become a "basic skill"

The number of graduates in liberal arts such as history, English and philosophy has been dropping dramatically. College students, worried about finding jobs after graduation, flock to business, computer science and pre-med courses. Between 1969 and 1979 the number of college freshmen who told questioners they thought it important to develop a philosophy of life shrank from 81.7% to 52.9%. Furthermore, researchers estimate that as many as 20% of today's high school seniors are functionally illiterate.

Such portents of intellectual ill-health pour from the 192 pages of The Humanities in American Life (University of California Press; $12.50). The book will be issued this week by a 32-member commission funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and chaired by the foundation's new president, Richard W. Lyman. The commissioners (a dean's list of scholars, including the presidents of Yale, Smith, Chicago and Tulane) regard the humanities as more than some knowledge about language, history, art and philosophy. They credit the humanities with helping people make critical judgments about ethics and social policy, understand diverse cultures and see connections between man's past and present. In those terms, the commissioners judge the humanities "widely undervalued" in the U.S.

Their prescription: the humanities should be taught better and earlier. The "highest educational priority" must be given to improving the quality of elementary and secondary schools. They call on the nation's school-board members and superintendents to stress such subjects as history, English, philosophy and foreign languages (now taken by only 15% of high school students, compared with 24% in 1965). They recommend that writing classes be limited to no more than 20 students, and that a minimum of $16 million in new federal funds be set aside to spread innovative humanities programs.

The report urges that colleges try harder to bring order and coherence to of ten chaotic undergraduate curriculums. But its main thrust is at elementary and secondary education. Federal programs for educating the disadvantaged and for teaching basic skills now total more than $3.5 billion, and the commissioners fear that by seeking only a "bare minimum of literacy," such programs undermine the broader, if less measurable, task of teaching students how to think. The report urges that "critical thinking" be viewed as a basic skill and be so defined by the U.S. Department of Education.

The notion sounds abstract. But the study cites successful work by the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children. Founded by Professor Matthew Lipman of Montclair State College in New Jersey, the institute offers a reading and discussion program that teaches the fundamentals of logic to schoolchildren as early as the fifth grade. The text for the program contains stories about young "Harry Stottlemeier" (Lipman's transliteration of Aristotle), who playfully makes discoveries about syllogistic major premises and unsnarls faulty logic like the following: "All minnows are fish; all sharks are fish; therefore, all minnows are sharks."

Fifteen schools in Bethlehem, Pa., are among those using Lipman's program. Apparently students enjoy it. Teachers say the work has taught children to define their terms and has improved spoken and written performance generally. While the Bethlehem school board is awaiting a formal evaluation of Lipman's program, Elementary Principal A. Thomas Kartsotis, 46, observes: "We see a lot of new programs come and go. I think this one's going to last." sb

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