A colleague reminded us yesterday that initially a Humanities education existed to strengthen the class divisions between the gentlemen class and the riff-raff. Only after a BA became the pre-requisite for doctors and lawyers did these professions become fit for gentlemen to practice. The liberal arts education was aimed at fostering a certain kind of sensibility, a way of being in the world that would set its recipients apart from the lowly classes.
This, of course, was a wrong and unjust approach. But the way to fight against it that we adopted was misguided (say I and not yesterday’s speaker.) Denying the existence of a more refined sensibility that can be reached through an exposure to the Humanities is not the way. Opening the access to it to more people- ideally, to everybody who wants it – is.
I’m some sort of a huge iconoclast for saying that a developed intellect is needed to enjoy opera but not to enjoy Eminem. This doesn’t mean that intellectuals can’t dig Eminem. Of course, they can. But there is a clear qualitative difference between texts created by Cervantes and texts delivered by Justin Bieber. This sounds like the most obvious thing in the world but academics -people who go to school for years to be able to understand Cervantes- go into fits when they hear it.
Once we have relinquished the idea that a Humanities education facilitates an entrance to a refined sensibility, what can we offer to students? All that’s left is that we are selling a chance to get a good job. And we all know where that marketing strategy led us.
And there’s so much hypocrisy. People who drag their children to the symphony from the age of 3 and who’d never release their kids into the job market with a habitual use of double negatives argue that correcting students’ speech is elitist. All of the empty social justice verbiage conceals the fact that many jobs are only accessible to those who have adopted the correct speech patterns, manners and refined sensibilities. We actually manufacture exclusion with our pathetic and dishonest blabber about inclusivity.
Clarissa's Blog 
A colleague reminded us yesterday that initially a Humanities education existed to strengthen the class divisions between the gentlemen class and the riff-raff.
In a way, it still is. If you have to take out student loans, if you don’t have existing connections, and if you don’t have familial financial support, the initial jobs you can get with a humanities education makes it look too expensive for lower class people, especially if you factor in the low-paid to unpaid internships students often need to land that first post-college job.
I know people with artistic talent. The people who have a family trust fund go to Berklee and the ones who don’t go to pharmacy school & indulge that as a hobby. There are places that’ll hire someone with a humanities degree from an elite school for a non humanities job over someone with a directly related degree, but it’s all about pedigree and nothing to do with any skills associated with a humanities degree. I’ve seen too many empty headed twits to believe otherwise.
I’m some sort of a huge iconoclast for saying that a developed intellect is needed to enjoy opera but not to enjoy Eminem.
You need a developed intellect to enjoy Tosca? :-p Opera is an acquired taste, not an intellectual exercise.
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Somehow, this acquired taste is only acquired by people with a sophisticated education.
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“this acquired taste is only acquired by people with a sophisticated education.”
How much is this a function of structural complexity and how much of it is a function of age (of the work)?
La donna e mobile was a massive popular hit in Europe (or would have been had there been charts measuring that kind of thing).
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Don Quixote was also a bestseller in its time but hey, Cervantes didn’t have to compete with HBO and Netflix streaming. 😆😆
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“Somehow, this acquired taste is only acquired by people with a sophisticated education.”
I understand from several different friends that opera is popular with almost everyone in Western Europe. One of my colleagues said he had a lengthy conversation with an Italian taxi driver about an opera he was going to see.
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Let’s not idealize Western Europeans and also let’s not forget how many of them come from a very different cultural tradition.
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“Let’s not idealize Western Europeans and also let’s not forget how many of them come from a very different cultural tradition.”
It helps that many operas are in the native language of the people, I suspect. And it is true that many Americans do pretty easily develop a taste for operas in English.
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I think it’s exposure more than just strictly education. I can’t speak for all of Western Europe, but in Germany a certain amount of music appreciation is built into the basic school curriculum so almost everyone gets some exposure to Opera no matter what their ultimate educational attainment. I have met a handful of Germans with no university education who were Opera fans because they were exposed to it in school. Live Opera is also fairly easy to access in Germany – there are lots of medium-largish cities and there is a notion that a city isn’t a “real” city unless it has a theater, a ballet, an orchestra, and an opera – so the city governments all spend lots of money subsidizing their Operas because it would be a serious loss of prestige if they let them close. That means almost everyone lives close to an Opera house. There are also deep discounts for students and school groups, so teenagers get taken to the Opera on field trips and get exposure to the whole experience, not just the music.
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I seem to recall that there are about four times as many opera performances annually in Germany as there are in the U. S. And the U. S. has more than any other country except Germany.
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“there is a notion that a city isn’t a “real” city unless it has a theater, a ballet, an orchestra, and an opera ”
Nice. In the US the same idea holds except it’s for professional sports. There’s so much prestige associated with having, say, a football team in your city. Which is why I guess all these stadiums are partly or fully funded by taxpayer money which goes directly into the pockets of billionaires.
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Regarding double negatives and other forms of sociolinguistic variation, both you and the academics you describe seem to be missing a crucial point. The goal is to not only develop students sociolinguistic awareness within the current state of affairs, but also their ability to critique the class (or other social) dynamics that create it and their understanding that it is not an either/or choice between language forms and a social identity they value. Neither ignoring nor correcting sociolinguistic variation accomplishes this. Maybe your new project should involve current linguistics research 😉
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I thought these ideas were current back in the 1960s. Has nothing new happened since then?
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No, there really has been no significant new theoretical developments in social sciences or humanities since the 1960s.
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I can’t say for everybody, but in Spanish Studies we have had veritable revolutions not just since the 1960s but even since the 1990s.
But Education is truly stuck and can’t get out of its rut.
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Also, I can’t speak for Education generally, but there have been lots of developments in language teaching since the 90s and even early 2000s. What was the last research you read on this? Maybe you are reading only in a subfield that hasn’t developed as much.
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What you are describing is from the 1960s-80s which appears to be the literature you are familiar with (all variation is linguistically equal, but not socially equal so we have to teach socially better forms). There have been lots of developments since then, which is what I’m describing, although apparently not clearly enough for you to see the difference. Try reading the book Second Dialect Acquisition, particularly the parts on the effectiveness of critical language awareness programs in helping speakers of stigmatized dialects develop strong abilities in the standard (hint: not by simply correcting them). This book discusses these issues in far more detail than I can in a blog comment.
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When people refer to language mistakes as “dialect”, that’s where they lose me. The Russian woman I met at a bar the other day told me she doesn’t understand the difference between “they’re, their, there” and uses them interchangeable. This isn’t a stigmatized dialect. She simply chose not to learn. But she has a very rich husband (judging by the clothes and jewelry), so she doesn’t need it.
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Double negatives (what you mentioned in the original post) are generally part of stigmatized dialects (these days, this wasn’t always the case in English) so that is why I mentioned them. If you actually read the book, you could read where it discusses why “dialect” is an imprecise term, but I suppose it is easier to just dismiss it all together and hold tight to your own beliefs. Understanding “they’re, their, there” isn’t a dialect difference, but developing meta-linguistic awareness is important here too. Sure, there are people like the Russian lady you met who don’t need to care, but again, your original post, as far as I can tell, was referring to people for whom this understanding does matter.
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The Russian woman also used not just double but triple negatives. Should I worship this as part of her identity or dismiss it as simple ignorance? What if she were in my classroom? Is it OK to correct her or to build her awareness of her profound oppression as a rich spoiled brat?
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Yes, you can (and should) correct her in your classroom–my argument is not that these things should be ignored. The reason taking identity into account is important is because someone like the woman you describe will probably never use standard English until she realizes that she can use standard forms AND retain her Russian identity, which is clearly important to her. If her Russian is bad, she uses bad English to mark her Russianness, if this makes sense. So just correcting her is unlikely to have the desired effect. Language and identity issues aren’t all about oppression, they effect rich brats too 🙂
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How can I know anybody’s “identity” in the classroom? Analyze the students’ names and skin colors and draw conclusions on that basis? But that’s monstrous. It’s ok to psychoanalyze a casual bar acquaintance you’ll never meet again in this way. But would you do that to a student? Clearly not.
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*affect, since we’re on the topic of correctness here…
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